The Study Of Story-Based English Reading Teaching In Higher Grades Of Primary School

The ability to read is a fundamental skill that children need to acquire in the primary school. However, in many primary schools in Guangzhou nowadays, the teachers often pay more attention to developing students' listening and speaking abilities. Reading is being neglected. Many students spend little time reading English. Most of them seldom enjoy reading in English. Therefore, we carried out the study on story-based English reading teaching in higher grades of primary school. The objectives of this study were as follows: selecting proper and interesting stories to enlarge the language input, using stories to improve the students' reading ability and reading interest, using English stories to help the students form the reading habits.This study included three parts: 1) Teachers selected suitable English stories according to the teaching objectives; 2) The higher graders improved their reading interest through reading English stories; 3) Students improved their reading ability by using effective reading strategies and skills.Based on the reading theories and the previous studies, this study carried out smoothly, such as Schema Theory, Urquhart & Weir's Reading Strategies Theory, Krashen's Input Hypothesis and Affective Filter Hypothesis, etc. The research lasted for 4 months. Jokes, newspaper stories, fairy tales, legends and fables were introduced in the research. The researcher chosen the stories that were near to the students' daily life and most of the stories had animals for their main characters because these could arouse the students' interests on reading. At the same time, the teacher encouraged the students to use suitable reading strategies and skills, such as brainstorming, skimming, scanning, information transfer and comparing, etc. Data were collected through a variety of instruments: pre-test, post-test, pre-experiment and post-experiment questionnaires and class observations. They were analyzed by SPSS 11.5 and charts.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One reviews reading theories and previous studies on story-based reading. Chapter Two states the importance of story-based English reading in higher grades of primary schools. Chapter Three describes the experiment on story-based English reading teaching in detail. In Chapter Four, the data of the experiment have been analyzed and discussed. And in Chapter Five the conclusion of the study, that story-based English reading could improve higher graders' English reading ability and arouse their reading interest, has been drawn by analyzing the data. There are six major findings of this research, such as arousing the students' reading interest, increasing the reading speed, improving reading comprehension, using effective reading strategies, developing vocabulary and forming the reading habits. At the same time, some practical pedagogical suggestions of story-based English teaching have been made for primary English teachers according to the conclusion of the experiment. The suggestions are as follows: 1) selecting proper reading materials for the students 2) encouraging the students to use effective reading strategies and skills, 3) designing different reading activities, 4) exploring other story-based activities.