Guidance Of Level-varied Approach To High School Students' Extra-curricular Reading

With the claimed importance of reading in English learning by many experts home and abroad(Carrel, 1987; Zuo, 2002; Harmer, 2003; Anderson, 2004; Hu,2004; 2005)the new requirement of English extra-curricular reading amount put forward by the Curriculum Standards for Middle School English (NCS) (2001), many English teachers, according to a survey conducted by Middle School English Extra-curricular Reading Research Group of Capital Normal University (Wang Xiaoping etc, 2006), realize it's high time that they launched English extra-curricular reading program among students. However, many English teachers, especially those in suburban and non-key schools, don't conduct extra-curricular reading activities among students due to the stress of the test-oriented school situation. Among those who have conducted extra-curricular activities, they tend to assign students to read some books after class and don't provide the needed guidance based on students' different levels and specific cases because most of the teachers are too busy or too exhausted to explore a set of effective methods to organize, guide and monitor students' extra-curricular reading. To see if we can change this awkward situation, the author of this thesis suggested a guidance model that may assist the teachers to sequence the extra-curricular reading activities in a more effective way. Based on her survey of the English teaching situation and students' proficiency distribution at Bailingmiao Middle School in Damao Banner in the city of Baotou and related literature from library research, the author introduced a model called Level-varied Guidance Approach to Extra-curricular Reading (LGAER) and carried out an experiment in Bailingmiao Middle School to testify its validity and feasibility.Based on the Chinese traditional belief in the principle that "Best teaching caters to students' individual needs", this guidance model, taking Level-varied Teaching (LT that features group differences but keeps the members within one group at the same level) as its basic framework, has drawn up many concepts from western applied linguistics (including the impact of individual differences on second language acquisition Input Hypothesis and Cooperative learning), reading and literary reading theories (such as Social Constructivism, Reader Response), and cognitive psychology (including the existence of individual differences, Mastery Learning by Brume).Two classes with the same level of English proficiency were chosen as the control group and the experimental group respectively. In the experimental class, LGAER was adopted; while in the control class, students just read the reading materials the teacher suggested and attended the one-hour question session if they needed the teacher's help. They were also required to talk about the book when they came to exchange for another after finishing reading it. Data collection included such means as pre-tests, formative assessment, post-tests, and questionnaire surveys.Data analysis focused on 1) placement differences in pre-tests and post-tests and 2) students' performance progress during the experiment.The results shows: 1) LGAER helped the teacher track down on students' reading performance and enabled them to adjust guidance properly to suit students' needs; 2) LGAER improved students' reading ability. 3) LGAER was more successful in helping students reach the five objectives put forward by NCS (2001). 4) Most students took delight in participating in LGAER, showing positive attitude to this approach to extra-curricular reading.With the positive results achieved from the experiment, the author is convinced that LGAER can be effectively and favorably applied to Chinese middle schools.