Action Research With High School English Reading Instruction

The society in the future will be the one whose members have to receive life-long education. Faced with such a trend, the role of a teacher will change essentially and his work will focus on the cultivation and improvement of his students' creative innovation and practical ability. To meet this challenge, a teacher should be equipped with the potential and power of self-development. Besides, he has to be more and more concerned with the problem that there is usually a gap between teaching and teaching research. He needs to take measures to make his teaching more special and systematic. Action research, which is considered one method to apply the theory of reflective teaching to teaching practice and is thought to improve teaching as well as advance self-development of a teacher, has been prevailing both at home and abroad in recent years. This thesis contains an introduction part, the body which consists of three chapters, and a concluding part. The introduction briefly argues about the necessity and feasibility of a teacher's doing action research . In Chapter 1, the author probes into the origin of action research. Then, based on the definitions, features and the procedures given by experts and scholars across the world, the author produces his own plan for conducting an action research on the teaching of English reading in senior schools. Chapter 2 is the key part of this thesis. At the beginning, the authorreflects upon the mode of teaching English reading he has followed all these years and realizes there exists some problem with it. After that, he carries out an action research step by step as his plan instructs. In this chapter, the author keeps a concrete record of the whole research process and describes each step in detail by using such data-collecting methods as questionnaire interview and analysis of the data collected. Besides, the author modifies his research plan properly during the process. Chapter 3 summarizes the effect of this action research in general and makes a deep theoretical probation into the impact on the students the research brings. In addition, he also mentions what influence this research casts on his belief that any teacher ought to and can be a researcher to some degree. In the concluding part the author appeals to all the educators to hold an optimistic attitude towards action research, makes a list of some rules that should be observed when an action research is conducted and points out the limit of action research.