Taking Notes While Reading: A Strategy To Improve Middle School Students' Reading Comprehension

This paper investigates the practice and effectiveness of the reading strategy "Taking notes while reading". The central research question that this paper explore is: Does the strategy of "taking notes while reading" work in improving students' reading comprehension and writing skills? This paper illustrates what "Taking notes while reading" is, how to take notes while reading, the principles and the characteristics of this reading strategy, the different roles of the teachers and the students, and the results of taking notes while reading.Task-based teaching / learning is the new development of communicative teaching theory. In this teaching method, the task consists of six fundamental components: goal, input, activities, the teacher's role, learner's role and settings. The author links these six components to this reading strategy. Guided by this theory, the author makes an empirical study and gets some useful data.And the data analysis is based on the questionnaires and examination results comparison of 118 respondents, who are from intermediate level class of grade two of the Hai'an Senior High School. The research results suggest that the strategy of "taking notes while reading" is helpful in improving the students' English reading comprehension and English writing. On the one hand, the respondents have brought up their interest of learning English, on the other hand, the respondents can read at a speed of 80-100 words a minute and they can do well in their reading comprehension and writing in the examinations. It helps students to lay a solid foundation for their long-life study.