On School-based Reading Course In Secondary Schools

Reading is an essential skill for students of English as a second language. It is also an important skill to be checked in the Entrance Examination for Secondary School students. The proportion of the reading comprehension is about 30% in the examination. It is one of the necessary teaching parts to help students improve their reading efficiencies. I investigated students' reading by a questionnaire and did an experiment to prove the necessities and possibilities of developing school-based reading course. I tried to explore how to improve students' reading abilities and teaching efficiency.In the teaching experiment, class 1 is an experimental class, adopting a new teaching method—high school students' inquiring into English reading within themselves, that is, asking a question—inquiring—summarizing—evaluating(or applying); class 2 ,whose original English marks are quite similar to class 1's, works as a control class. The teacher in class 2 teaches her students English reading directly. In order to make this teaching more persuasive, the author chooses some students from the two classes as three different groups, namely, top-class students (whose total marks are over 477), middle-class students (whose total marks are between 450 and 400 ), and low-class students ((whose total marks are below 340). The number of students in each group in class 1 is the same as that in class 2. The author especially focuses on these three groups to know how they get on with their English. To these two classes, textbooks, exercises and other materials to go with teaching are the same; teaching time is equal except that teaching method in grammar is different.Before the experiment, a questionnaire is designed to examine the degrees of the newcomers' inquiring on their own. According to the results, the author analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the present conditions of the students' self-inquiring. The advantages are as follows:1). Each student has a certain ability to observe and their ability to observe has nothing to do with their study. Parts of students have keen insight.2). Parts of low-class students are good at thinking; some students can think about a problem in many ways, and a large number of students like pioneering work and intend to create something new. 3). Many top-class and middle-class students control themselves better.And the disadvantages are:1). Students can't watch things carefully and deeply in general. A lot of students only observe the surfaces of objects.2). The whole students don't like asking questions. They learn textbooks and knowledge teachers have taught without comprehending, which maybe shows they are lazy in thinking.3). All the low-class students are forced to study and they are always affected by outside surroundings.Considering the advantages and disadvantages mentioned above, the author does an experiment which is divided into three different periods. In the first period, the author teaches all the students in the experimental class reading in the new teaching method in order to let students know the process of self-inquiring into grammar; In the second period, the author guides some students who still have problems in self-inquiring; and in the last period, students inquire into reading by themselves. The author acts as an administrator and instructor. The results of the experiment show that the students in the experimental class made greater progress in their English learning during the experimental time. At the same time, how to cultivate high school students' ability to self-inquire can improve all kinds of capacities of students, such as observing capacity, thinking and creating capacities. The new method not only makes students joyful in studying but also teaches them knowledge and study methods, which benefit their lives.However, self-inquiring English learning model is a great challenge for those students who are dependent on their teachers, as a result, there exist many problems which will be discussed further in the future. What's more, the questionnaire is done in a small area, the datum collected is not sufficient. All these need to be probed in the future.