Exploration Of The Internet Resources For Reading Instruction In Secondary Schools

English reading is one of the most important language skills for ESL/EFL students. It is a widely acknowledged fact that the improvement of reading depends heavily on a large amount of reading. However, students in Chinese secondary schools do not read often and do not read much. One of the most important reasons is that the students lack reading interest and appealing reading materials. On the other side of the picture, vast reading materials are available on the Internet especially those English reading websites. How to utilize these valuable reading resources to promote the students' reading interest and reading competence has become a common concern among the English educators.After searching the English reading websites scattered on the Internet extensively, the author finds out that the reading materials on the Internet are rich both in content and quantity. However, the vast English reading websites also pose a practical problem to teachers: the sheer number of English reading websites available can be overwhelming for time-trapped teachers to find the appropriate ones for their students. Therefore, this thesis strives to search appropriate English reading websites extensively, classifies and analyzes those websites to discover their features, advantages, and the feasibility in reading instruction, and finally attempts to provide an online reading directory for the teachers' convenience.The author first searched the English reading websites in Google with different key words such as "ESL/EFL-reading" and "English reading" and found that the English reading resources for reading instruction were both interesting and abundant, then selected hundreds of appropriate English reading websites for analysis. In the next step, the authoranalyzed the content, features, and presentations of those websites in accordance with TESL and CALL theories, and classified the websites in different categories in terms of the reading purposes: reading for getting information (e-newspapers), for pleasure (stories and reading games), and for improving reading skills (reading exercise). And then the author recommended scores of appropriate English reading websites in each category, and finally attempted to provide an online reading directory which can be used both by teachers in the Web classroom and by students outside the classroom. Besides, the author also tried to shed some light on the standards for selecting appropriate English reading websites on the basis of TESL and CALL theories. It is hoped that this study can help teachers incorporate the Internet resources into their reading instruction to some extent and therefore has practical significance.However, this study is only an attempt to integrate the Internet resources into the reading instruction and the online reading directory includes only a small amount of reading websites compared with the vast Internet resources. Much remains to be further explored in this regard.