Using Graded Teaching In Guiding Junior High Students In Their Extra-curricular English Reading

With the claimed importance of reading in English learning by many experts home and abroad (Carrel, 1987; Zuo, 2002; Harmer, 2003; Anderson, 2004; Hu,2004; Wen, 2005) and the new requirement of English extra-curricular reading amount put forward by the New Curriculum Standards for Middle School English (NCS) (2001), many English teachers, according to a survey conducted by Middle School English Extra-curricular Reading Research Group of Capital Normal University (Wang et al, 2006), realize it's high time that they launched English extra-curricular reading program among students. However, many English teachers, especially those in suburban and non-key schools, don't conduct extra-curricular reading activities among students due to the stress of the test-oriented school situation. Among those who have conducted extra-curricular activities, they tend to assign students to read some books after class and don't provide the needed guidance based on students' different levels and specific cases because most of the teachers are too busy or too exhausted to explore a set of effective methods to organize, guide and monitor students' extra-curricular reading. To see if we can change this awkward situation, the author of this thesis suggested a guidance model that may assist the teachers to sequence the extra-curricular reading activities in a more effective way. Based on her survey of the English teaching situation and students' proficiency distribution at Liulihe Middle School in Fang Shan district in Beijing and related literature from library research, the author introduced a model called Graded Guidance Approach to Extra-curricular Reading (GGAER) and carried out an experiment in Liulihe Middle School to testify its validity and feasibility.Based on the Chinese traditional belief in the principle that "Best teaching caters to students' individual needs", this guidance model, taking Graded Teaching (GT that featuresgroup differences but keeps the members within one group at the same level) as its basic framework, has drawn up many concepts from western applied linguistics (including the impact of individual differences on second language acquisition, Input Hypothesis and Cooperative learning), reading and literary reading theories (such as Social Constructivism, Reader Response) and practice models (such as Book Club program and Literature Circles), and cognitive psychology (including the existence of individual differences, Mastery Learning by Brume and the zone of proximal development).Two classes with the same level of English proficiency were chosen as the control group and the experimental group respectively. In the experimental class, GGAER was adopted; while in the control class, students just read the reading materials the teacher suggested and attended the one-hour question session if they needed the teacher's help. They were also required to talk about the book when they came to exchange for another after finishing reading it. Data collection included such means as pre-tests, formative assessment, post-tests, and questionnaire surveys. Data analysis focused on 1) placement differences in pre-tests and post-tests and 2) students' performance progress during the experiment.The results shows: 1) GGAER helped the teacher track down on students' reading performance and enabled them to adjust guidance properly to suit students' needs; 2) GGAER improved students' reading ability. 3) GGAER was more successful in helping students reach the five objectives put forward by NCS (2001). 4) Most students took delight in participating in GGAER, showing positive attitude to this approach to extra-curricular reading.With the positive results achieved from the experiment, the author is convinced that GGAER can be effectively and favorably applied to Chinese middle schools.