A Study On Effective Ways To Teach English Reading In Senior High Schools Based On The New Curriculum

From the observation of English teaching practice in the past few years, the author has found that there are still some problems existing in present reading teaching in sernior high middle schools. Owning to the existence of the college entrance exam, teacher-centered or grammar-based teaching method is still frequently used in most reading classes. In order to improve the English language teaching, the new standard of the curriculum was issued in our country in 2003. According to the new standard, the English language teaching is divided into nine levels, and reading is one of the important parts with specific requirements in each level.This paper investigates into the current problems in reading classes and discussed some possible ways to improve the reading effectiveness in senior high schools under the setting of the new curriculum.Through several questionnaires into the present situation in English teaching and learning, the author found out those problems existing in the reading classes of senior high schools. The reading teaching mainly concentrates on the learning of vocabulary, grammar rules and sentence structures. Classroom activities seem to be relatively simple. Students don't know how to get useful information. As a result, they don't have enough effective training in reading comprehension. This study focuses on solving the problems by designing the classroom activities properly according to the task-based teaching approach, and helping students to develop effective reading strategies so as to improve the students'ability of reading comprehension. In this way, we hope that the reading effectiveness in senior high English classes can be raised.In order to solve these problems the author carried out an experiment, in which 92 students were chosen from two classes of Senior Two in Guangzhou Nanwu Senior High School:Class 1(CG:control group) and Class 3 (EG:Experimental group). Before the experiment, the pre-test was conducted between the two groups. There was no significant difference after analyzing the scores from the test using SPSS 17.0. When giving lessons to students in EG during the two months'experiment, the author still followed the traditional teaching method in CG However, the author tried to help students in EG learn how to use reading strategies and how to get useful information by designing the classroom activities properly. After the experiment, the author found that students in EG were eager to take part in the reading activities and could finish the tasks successfully. While reading passages, those students gradually began to use some of the reading strategies, for example when asked to find out some details, they could scan the passage and tried to find them out quickly and correctly; when asked to get the implied meaning of the passage, they could find out some related information and finally made the inference. After the post-test, the reading scores were analyzed by T-test with the help of SPSS 17.0 and there was a significant difference between the two groups, which meant the training had some effect on the reading effectiveness.