The Research On Applying English Newspaper Reading To Senior High School English Teaching

Reading is one of the important four basic language skills in teaching and learning of English. With the further development of educational reform, it has been receiving more and more attention. The New English Curriculum Standards and the New English Syllabus put forward higher requirements in students'reading ability and the amount of reading and claim that the rich teaching resources such as audio-media, newspapers, magazines and the Internet should be made full use of to expand the ways of learning and using English. Long-term teaching practice also shows that it is far from students'satisfaction to cultivate students'reading ability by only depending on English textbooks. Therefore, it is imperative that new teaching resources should be exploited. English newspapers are considered to be excellent sources of authentic teaching materials and widely applied to English teaching with their diverse features. They have new contents, various articles and interesting stories. Their contents are close to life, updated and fashionable.This study concerns whether applying English newspaper reading to English teaching can make up the deficiency of traditional textbooks, enlarge students'vocabulary and improve students'reading abilities. The experiment was conducted in the authors'two parallel English classes of Senior 2 in Wa Fangdian No.3 Senior High School for about six months. One of the classes was appointed as the experimental class and the other as the control class. Four kinds of data collecting methods—pre-test and post-test, the questionnaires, the self-evaluation sheets and the interview were used in this study. Students in the control class were taught in a traditional way by using only textbooks. Based on the traditional way, the teacher carried out English newspaper reading teaching training in the experimental class. Teacher instructed students in the experimental class to have English newspaper reading training in and after class. Student-centered activities were designed by using newspaper—21st Century Teens Senior Edition to involve students in the classroom activities actively. The analyses and comparisons of the data collected showed that the levels of reading comprehension of the two classes were similar before the training. After about six months of training, the reading ability of the students in the experimental class was obviously much higher. The whole achievement of the experimental class was higher than that of the control class. The data collected from the experiment also proved that the majority of the students in the experimental class took keen interest in reading English newspapers. After the experiment, they had acquired some reading strategies and had made great progress in their acquirement of vocabulary and knowledge of foreign cultures. All the results prove that English newspaper reading contributes to the improvement of students'reading abilities. English newspaper reading is worth further promoting in English teaching.