A Survey Of The Situation Of High School Students' Extracurricular Reading

Reading is one of the four basic language skills in English learning. The Senior English Curriculum Standard has set relevant demands on reading ability and the amount of extracurricular reading in the language skill aims of different grades. Most language experts and scholars have come to an agreement that a lot of extra-curriculum reading contributes to the improvement of language competence. In the light of Krashen's theory of second language acquisition, autonomous learning theory,schema theory,etc. the thesis illustrates the necessity and importance of conducting extracurricular reading activity. And a survey on the situation of extracurricular reading activity has been made among 490 students from nine senior high schools randomly selected from six counties (city,district) of Wenzhou City.The results reveal that extracurricular reading activity has a positive effect on English competence,especially on reading ability and the increasing of vocabulary, but because of too much school work, many problems still exist,such as lack of reading materials, spending a little time. It has also been found that students think that most English teachers support the activity,but they don't give enough guidance. Therefore, more help is needed in reading methods and reading strategies. The results also show that some differences between sexes and grades exist in some aspects.Based on the findings and other research, suggestions on how to conduct extracurricular reading activity are proposed, which include choosing reading materials,providing reading methods and strategies to students, developing students'self-reading ability, and conducting cooperative learning, in an effort to cultivate the students'reading interest, improve their reading ability and enable them to achieve all-round development in their foreign language study.