Towards Authenticity Of Reading Materials In English Learning

Reading, as a source of comprehensible input, plays an important role in Second Language Acquisition. And authentic reading materials, which offer a real language environment for second language learners, bring them closer to the culture of the target language. In that sense, authentic materials are unrivaled by non-authentic materials in helping learners develop language proficiency. Therefore extensively reading authentic materials is an effective way to the second language acquisition.Nevertheless, reading materials in English textbooks for Chinese learners, especially those for middle school students lack authenticity because they are specially designed for those alleged "under-competent" learners, and the extensive reading activities in senior middle schools often lack authentic involvement as the students are for the most part engaged in doing exercises for reading comprehension rather than authentic reading process. In addition, there exists a common intuition that the L2 proficiency is the prerequisite for L2 reading performance and that the limited command of English of middle school students as well as the difficulty levels of authentic reading materials makes it almost impossible to apply authentic materials in extensive reading activity in senior middle schools. In that case, the author attempted to use authentic materials in extensive reading activity in English in FEC (Sino-New Zealand Friendly Experimental Class), a class jointly run by a Chinese and a New Zealand school, to see whether those students could understand authentic reading materials in English,and to see whether this kind of extensive reading activity could improve the students' reading motivation and their reading strategies.This thesis involves both descriptive study and experimental study. The subjects of the experimental group (EG) and the control group (CG) are 60 FEC students, with their English proficiency of intermediate-and-above levels. In and outside class, EG only read authentic materials while CG only read non-authentic materials, and the author controlled the independent variable---the reading materials. Amount of valid data are collected through pretests, posttests and a questionnaire, and much valuable information are acquired through weekly book reports and interviews. No obvious difference was found about the English levels between the two groups before the experiment, but after the 30-week training sessions, the result revealed that the self-confidence and interest in the subjects of EG are much improved and they had developed certain reading strategies. It can be said that the experiment verifies and supports the three assumptions that the author put forward. It's believed that this research is of theoretical value and practical significance for extensive reading activity in English in senior middle school classes, and for that matter, for Chinese students' English learning.