Promoting Reading Ability Through Newspaper Reading

Reading, as a language skill, is of great importance for people to live and develop in modern society. For many students, reading is by far the most important of four skills in learning a foreign language. On account of the lack of authentic English learning environment in China, reading is a major channel for students to be exposed to the target language. So, reading teaching is considered to be one of the most important teaching processes in English teaching in senior middle school. Most teachers have gained lots of experience on how to teach textbooks, but textbooks are far from enough for students to rely on to fulfill learning task or to get a good score in the College Entrance Exam (in which reading accounts for almost half of the full mark) let alone to master English. Textbooks'reading materials are not updated and the reading amount is not adequate, which does limit the students'reading ability. Thus, supplementary reading material selection has long been one of the controversial issues in the teaching of reading.Although an agreement on this issue is.hard to reach, one point has so far been commonly accepted that reading materials should provide students with new, sufficient and useful information relevant to their reading goals.For selection of the supplementary reading material,the atuthor maintains that the popular 21st Century Teens can provide students with fresh, updated, interesting and readable news articles. It fulfills the objective of English reading and is helpful to enlarge students'vocabulary, pass the College Entrance Exam and promote students'mastery of reading skills. In view of this, the author proposes that 21st Century Teens can be adopted as the supplementary reading material. To test this hypothesis, both the quantitative research and the qualitative research are adopted.The qualitative research includes the author's observation of students' opinions about the reading material and a questionnaire was used to conduct the learners'reading needs analysis. From the outcome of the questionnaire, it is found that students like reading interesting and updated news stories.21st Century Teens just fulfills their requirements. It is appropriate to apply it as the reading material. The qualitative research also includes the analysis of the 21St Century Teens to prove that it is feasible to be applied as the supplementary reading material.The quantitative research refers to the experiment research with subjects from the 2007 grade students from BaoGang No.One Middle School. A pretest was administered to the two classes. The class with slightly higher mean scores is defined as the control class (CC) and the other as the experiment class (EC). Based on the confirmation that these two classes are similar in English language proficiency,21st Century Teens as the supplementary reading material was applied into teaching the experiment class while only the current textbook was adopted in teaching the control class. This teaching experiment lasted for about eight months. At the end of the experiment, a post-test was administered in these two classes. The results of EC and CC in the pretest and the posttest were then fed into computer for SPSS analysis.From the experiment, we got the following results:the application of the 21st Century Teens to the reading teaching is effective in strengthening students'learning interest, enlarging their vocabulary and promoting their reading ability or even promoting their overall English level as well as helping students to develop good reading habitsThe author concludes that it is both feasible and beneficial to use 21st Century Teens for the reading teaching in Chinese senior middle-school English class.