On The Application Of CBI Into Improving Extra-curricular English Reading Ability Of Senior High Students

As New Curriculum Reform has raised higher demand on English teaching and learning, English Language Curriculum Standards for Senior High School regards the development of autonomous learning ability as a priority for English curriculum and specifies the requirements on extra-curricular reading amounts. However, problems in extra-curricular reading in high shools are less studied than necessary, and there are even less researches integrating both theory and practice. Hence based on Content-based Instruction (CBI), this dissertation will study the theoretical and practical problems in extra-curricular reading of high shool students.CBI is a teaching approach which increasely attacts attention for the last decades. CBI connects closely the learning of subjects with that of language. The language, as a media or tool, facilitates subjects learning, while subject content provides learners with sufficient comprehensible input which creates context and motivation for language learning.In order to learn about the current situation of extra-curricular English reading of senior high students, an investigation has been carried out with backbone English teachers from middle school and sophomores from No.1 Xianggang Middle School as targets. Based on statistics of questionnaires recorded by Microsoft Excel, the following items has been analysed from the perspective both of teachers and students: the aims and significance of extra-curricular English reading, the choice of reading materials, the amount of time invested in and the main factors influncing unfavourably extra-curricular English reading.Since CBI has provided a theoretical foundation and the investigation has exposed specific problems in current situation, the dissertation discusses how to define extra-curricular English reading ability, how to choose reading materials and how to apply reading stategies in both teaching and learning. An experiment is also carried out to see the effectiveness of applying CBI in to high school learning. Class 293, a key science class of No.1 Xianggang Middle School is trained as experimental class which receives instuctions in accordance with CBI, while class 292, the other key science classe from the same school is treated as contorl class. Pretest and posttest have been done to see the effect both before and after the training. SPSS Version 17 is employed to analyse the test results, which hasn't show obvious difference. The main reason for the lack of differentiation lies in the weakness of pretest and posttest papers which have too many elements irrelevant to the test of reading ability.