Action Research On English Reading Teaching In Senior Middle School

Reading is an important part of English teaching in senior middle school. Reading ability is one of the basic language skills that requested by the New Curriculum Standards. There are quite a lot problems in reading class. For instance, they are deficient in reading speed and comprehension. The point of solving these problems is how to apply advanced reading teaching theories and methods into reading practice, how to adapt for the present state of reading teaching in senior middle school, how to satisfy the needs of students, and generate a reading teaching model with the teacher's characteristics on these bases. As a way to integrates research into teaching, action research is considered as one of the best ways for teachers to participate in EFL teaching and research. The research emphasizes the teacher as a researcher, and encourages them to generate their own educational theories and to achieve self-professional development.This thesis applies action research to Chinese reading teaching, starting with exploring and analyzing the present state of reading teaching by a questionnaire and pretest, and surveyed the possibility of applying it to reading teaching class. Then it puts forward the hypotheses about the factors that affect reading ability, and implements an action research over a 13-week period on the experiment class, aiming to search for better ways to improve students'reading ability. The four aspects are vocabulary, background knowledge, reading strategies and outside reading. At last, it reflects action research's practical effect in teaching reading, and further illustrates the practicality and feasibility of this research by comparing the posttest data of the experiment class and the control class.The average scores of experiment class are higher than that of the control class. The results of posttest shows that students improves a lot in guessing words meaning and using reading strategies, that their background knowledge and outside reading enlarges widely. Therefore, action research is an effective way to improve Chinese middle school students'reading ability. Not only can it bridge the gap between teaching practice and theory, but also enhance teachers' professional development.However, because of limited time and environmental restriction, there are some limitations in the research. For instance, it only covers four main factors that influence reading ability of senior middle school students, which leaves much room for further research. Through the action research, students'reading ability and teachers'theoretical and practical ability improve a lot. Besides, it offers an effective way of combining theory and practice, as well as promoting teachers'professional development.