The Application Of Clt In English Reading Teaching In Middle School

Aiming at finding a solution to the poor reading competence of middle school students and finding out a right teaching methodology to cultivate the students' communicative competence in reading, this thesis investigates CLT (communicative language teaching), which advocates teaching language through meaningful communication. This thesis first makes a general description of CLT and reading theories. Then it gives a general survey of the present middle school English reading teaching, which based on two questionnaires and classroom observation, pointing out that the traditional teaching approach in reading should be improved, for it is too "teacher-centered" to be any good for effective reading and communicative efficiency of the learners. Based on the survey of the students, the thesis concludes that CLT is feasible in reading teaching, which is further confirmed by the positive findings of the teaching practice.The teaching practice tries out specific strategies to follow the four principles of CLT—communicative principle, meaning principle, learner-centered principle, task principle on the basis of the interactive approach and schema theory, and proves that applying CLT in reading teaching could produce good results. This thesis also points out the ways of learner training and proposes the uncontrollable variable— the negative backwash of examination.