An Action Research On English Reading Teaching In Rural Junior Middle Schools

English reading is one of the most important basic skills that junior middleschool students must grasp. If students cannot read effectively, they cannot learn aforeign language well. Therefore, reading teaching holds a high status in Englishteaching in junior middle school. But many English teachers in rural junior middleschool often complain that students cannot read effectively, while students are notsatisfied with their reading situation. How to make students do some effective readingis a pressing problem which teachers are eager to solve.The key points of solving that problem lie in how to change the presentsituation of reading teaching and apply advanced reading teaching theories to practiceto meet the students’ practical needs and to build up teachers’ own reading teachingmodel. As a method to bridge the gap between theory and practice, action research isregarded as one of the best ways which teachers participate in teaching and research.It is one of the effective ways of teachers’ training, as well as a shortcut for teachers toachieve self-professional development. Action research lays stress on the idea thatteachers, as researchers, should reflect their own instruction carefully, find out andanalyze the problems in teaching, work out and implement plans to solve them andimprove their teaching.This thesis applies action research to English reading teaching in rural juniormiddle school, starting with analyzing the present state of students’ reading throughdata collection to attest the hypotheses on the factors that influence students’ reading ability. Then a10-week teaching plan is worked out from the five aspects (vocabulary,reading strategies, reading habits, background knowledge and reading out of class)and then implemented, aiming to enhance students’ reading ability. In the end,practical teaching effect is reflected and the practicality and feasibility of actionresearch are further illustrated through comparing the pretest and posttest data.Here is an outline of the paper. This paper consists of five chapters. ChapterOne introduces the background and significance of the study and the structure of thethesis. Chapter Two is literature review which mainly presents the theories of reading,reading teaching and action research. Chapter Three is the methodology of the study.This part contains research questions, subjects, instruments and action researchprocess. Among those, action research which was carried out for ten weeks is stressed.Chapter Four is results and discussion. The results of questionnaires, interviews andtests are analyzed. The factors of affecting students’ reading ability are discussed. Inthe end, suggestions of English reading teaching are proposed. Chapter Five is theconclusion which includes major findings, implications, limitations andrecommendations for future research.