A Feasibility Study Of Offering English Extensive Reading Course In Junior Middle Schools

According to Chomsky's Innatist Hypothesis (1965),a human was born with language acquisition device and language input can activate it and make it function. Krashen (1985) holds that only when input is comprehensible, will language acquisition happen. At the same time, Krashen points out that if the learner receives enough comprehensible language input, they can get necessary grammar. Therefore, the teacher needn't teach language forms in the next stage in a special way and as long as the students receive large amounts of language input, he can get the- language forms automatically. That means that the teacher's major duty is to make the students receive as much language input as possible. Krashen and Terrell (1983:131) suggest that"reading may also be a source of comprehensible input in a second language". Krashen (1989) also claims that reading skills improve according to the amount of reading done. As an effective way of language input, reading can be divided into two stages: the initial stage of decoding and the second stage of comprehension. As a matter of fact, Extensive reading can perform the supplementing function to intensive reading. If a middle school student doesn't read much, he will get trapped in the unfavorable circle. So extensive reading ought to be paid as much attention to as intensive reading. The students badly need to begin extensive reading to develop their synthetic reading capacity.In today's schools, too many children struggle with learning to read. As many teachers and parents will attest, reading failure has exacted a tremendous long-term consequence for children's developing self-confidence and motivation to learn, as well as for their later school performance. One of the biggest problems English teachers complain about in the practice of the new curriculum criteria is reading. The amount of extensive reading in the new curriculum doubles than that of the past, raising the difficulty of reading teaching. Researches on English extensive reading teaching have been carried on for many years and a lot has been achieved. However, the researches have tended to deal with college and senior high school students, with very few studies looking at junior middle students. In a sense, extensive reading teaching and learning has been comparatively undervalued in Junior Middle English teaching.New Criteria for English Courses for General Middle School requires that teachers should help students develop effective reading skills. As a teaching base of English experiment, Foreign Language School Attached to Guangxi Normal University makes achievements from offering extensive reading course to the junior students. Are the teachers in other junior schools aware of the importance of extensive reading? If they are, do they have any plans to instruct? How are the results? Compared with the students who don't have the instruction of extensive reading, do their students under-instruction benefit something? To answer these questions, the writer studied Chomsky's Innatist Hypothesis and Krashen's Input Hypothesis and some relevant theories. Enlightened by them, the writer designed an investigation of English extensive reading carried in two junior middle schools, Foreign Language School Attached to Guangxi Normal University (FLS) and Guilin No.1 Middle School; and the teachers in FLS carried out a two-year experiment, practicing ang adjusting the ways of extensive reading teaching a lot. Also, the writer compared the terminal exam scores of the two schools at the end of the Fall Semester of the 3rd school year. A data statistic software named SPSS was employed. From data analysis and comparison, the thesis arrives at the following conclusions: 1st, extensive reading is an efficient way to increase the students'language input. So the course may be offered based on the classic linguistic theories. 2nd, if English extensive reading course is offered in junior middle schools, it will at a earlier time help the students form the right reading habits, increase English studying interest and improve their abilities of using English as a whole. 3rd, in recent years, setting up extensive reading class is in good conditions.There are six chapters in this thesis: Chapter 1, the instruction, states the background of this study, English extensive reading together with its definition, necessity, advantages, the purpose and the intention of making a comprehensive research on the feasibility of offering English extensive reading course in junior middle schools. Chapter 2 introduces some famous theories and achievements on researches of English extensive reading. Chapter 3 explains some elements of the experiment and introduces how the experiment was carried out. Chapter 4 is about data analysis, comparison and discussion. Chapter 5 offers some suggested plans about the design, the arrangement, the principles and the evaluation followed by some anticipated problems and solutions. Chapter 6 shows the concluding remarks: experiment conclusion, the limitation of the study and suggestions for further studies.