An Action Research On Fostering Senior Students' Self-Reading Abilities With The Help Of Guided Learning Plans

The National English Curriculum for Senior Students describe that the task for elementary period is to arouse and foster the students'interest in learning, They can gain strong confidence, form good habits of learning, develop their effective learning strategies and acquire their self-learning abilities. The key point in the teaching of the Senior English is to develop the students' ability of reading English. This demands that the students should be able to acknowledge the characteristics of different types of writing, understand the long and difficult sentences by analyzing their structures, share the ideas and altitude in the reading materials, appreciate some of simplified English literature and grasp the information from the reading material and process it. As for the amount of reading, the curriculum requires the students to master more than 360,000 words. The reform of the new curriculum advocates the learner-centered teaching method not the teacher-centered method. However, the phenomenon that the teacher explain the text all the time is still seen everywhere. The students are always listening to the teachers' explaining and analyzing the text passively. They have a lack of the enthusiasm for reading. In order to change this and foster the self-reading abilities, the author of this discourse did a whole term action research on the teaching reading with the guided learning plan. The purpose of this research is to see whether the guided learning plan in the teaching of reading is effective and practical.This research is based on the theory of self-learning, reading strategies and the concept of the new curriculum. When teaching reading, we ask the students to read the materials according to the plan prepared in advance. Thus, the students' abilities of reading independently and reading strategies are developed. These include the understanding of the students' own reading purpose and methods, the setting of the aims of reading, the choosing of the reading strategies, the watch of the use of their reading strategies and the evaluation of the reading. Over a term's teaching, we can see the use of the guided plan can cultivate the students' self-reading ability effectively and it lays the foundation of the life-long learning..