An Empirical Study On The Role Of Repeated Reading In Improving Students’ English Reading Competence

English reading is an important input. It not only can help students learn moregeneral and language knowledge, but also cultivate students’ ability to obtain andprocess information. Moreover, it can improve students’ overall language ability.Therefore, people are paying more and more attention to reading. The New CurriculumStandard explicitly mentioned that the aims of reading teaching are to cultivate readingstrategies, build up language sense, especially the ability to obtain and processinformation. Therefore, the reading goals of English teaching are to improve students’reading comprehension and reading rate, cultivate and develop their reading strategies.Through consulting relevant literature, the author found that repeated reading waswidely used in foreign countries. It can improve reading rate, accuracy andcomprehension. Unfortunately, researches about repeated reading are quite limited inour country. Repeated reading means to let the students read an article until they canreach a certain speed and understanding. So the motivation and purpose of this thesis isapplying repeated reading to English teaching in our senior high school so as to checkout whether it can improve students’ reading ability or not.Thus, this thesis focuses on four research questions. Question1: Can repeatedreading motivate students to read? Question2: Can repeated reading improve students’reading fluency and comprehension? Question3: Whether the students use somereading strategies？If yes, what strategies they use. Question4: Can repeated readingdevelop language ability?So literature review, experimental comparison and questionnaires are used as toolsfor this study. In the experiment, the author chose two classes in Grade1in a seniorhigh school in Tangshan, Hebei province. The two classes were in the same standard inthe pre-test, one was chosen as experimental class, the other was controlled class. Thisexperiment lasted five weeks. The experimental class had three times training everyweek with the teacher’s guidance, while the controlled class did the reading in theroutine way. At the end of the experiment, they went on a post-test. At the same time,students in the experimental class needed to fill in a questionnaire and handed in reading reports.According to the analysis of the experimental data, the conclusions were reached.It is safe to say that repeated reading can arouse students’ interest in reading. It is aneffective way to help students improve reading fluency and comprehension. Thestudents use reading strategies in the repeated reading. Lastly, repeated reading canimprove listening, speaking and writing. Thus, we can try to use repeated reading inEnglish teaching. Of course, some problems and deficiencies also existed in thisexperiment, which need to be continuously improved.