The Application Of Pre-reading Strategy To The Teaching Of English Reading In Rural Senior High School

Reading, as one of the five fundamental skills in English learning plays a very important role in EFL acquisition. However, Chinese high school students' reading ability is still not satisfactory. Widdowson (1986) defines reading as a communication activity. Goodman (1971) points out that reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game and it involves an interaction between thought and language. Therefore, reading is an interactive process of communication. According to the concepts of reading, a number of theorists (i.e. Goodman, 1970; Smith, 1978) have developed interactive theories of reading. And these interactive theories which now dominate reading research and strongly influence teaching practice draw heavily on schema theory.Schema theory plays an important role of the reader's background knowledge in language comprehension. In order to improve the reading comprehension, pre-reading activities should be used to accomplish both goals: building new background knowledge as well as activating existing background knowledge (Carrell, 1988)This thesis attempts to study the impact of strategy-based instruction on the teaching of reading and to discuss the importance of pre-reading strategies through the research on the students in Nationality Middle School, Sai Han District. It also provides some pre-reading teaching strategies with practical samples to show how to use teaching strategies to lead, guide and support students to improve students'reading ability. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used in the study. The data are collected from the questionnaire, teacher logs and tests. The major findings of three months'pre-reading strategy-based instruction show that under the teacher's instruction on pre-reading strategies, students can have learned to use some common strategies such as, previewing and discussing to activate and develop prior knowledge to read more actively and independently. Their reading scores rise obviously.This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One identifies the present situation in the teaching of reading to the students in Chinese EFL classroom especially in rural high schools. It shows teachers from rural high school seldom give students specific instruction on pre-reading strategies. They have little knowledge of how to use proper pre-reading strategies to help students get and use the reading strategies to activate and develop their prior knowledge to read actively. What's more, the rural students do not have good reading habits and they have weak awareness to use pre-reading activities to activate and develop their background knowledge. Therefore, this thesis is to study the effect of applying pre-reading activities based on strategy instruction on Chinese rural high school students.Chapter Two provides a review of the existing published literature about the theory and concept of reading comprehension, reading process, schema theory and strategy.Chapter Three describes the research methodology, including the procedures of the instruction. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used in the study. In addition, the author provides some common pre-reading strategies and teaching cases.Chapter Four shows the results and analyses of the research. Results signify that both English teachers and students lack the use of pre-reading activities in their reading classes. Meanwhile, the hypothesis of this study has been tested to be correct. That is, pre-reading activities have good effects on Chinese rural students' EFL reading comprehension. Both teachers and students should pay more attention to the pre-reading activities.Chapter Five offers a conclusion of the whole thesis based on the findings of the study. It presents the implications of the study and also points out the limitations of the study.