A Study On The Application Of21st Century In Senior High School English Reading Teaching

English reading is one of the basic language skills and the main access toacquiring information. Besides, it plays an essential role in English teaching andlearning. Therefore, developing students’ reading abilities is a main task in senior highschools, which is the crucial period to form solid foundations for students’ futureacademic and occupational success.The National English Curriculum in senior high school requires that studentsshould possess much higher reading ability and reading amount than before. One ofthe requirements is that they should be capable of reading English newspapers ormagazines after three years’ English study. However, students have few opportunitiesto read English newspaper, and their English reading materials are only confined tothe textbook which contains inefficient information and limited vocabulary.Moreover, the grammar-oriented and teacher-centered teaching methods still exist inEnglish reading teaching.According to the requirements of English Curriculum, teachers and studentsshould use various teaching and learning resources such as newspapers, magazines,audio-media and the internet to enrich the methods of teaching and learning English.Teachers should also give up the traditional methods of teaching, enriching the classby creating effective teaching models and organizing various teaching activities.The English newspaper---21stcentury is an appropriate reading material forstudents. It has many special features such as various articles, the latest contents andinteresting stories. It is also close to students’ life and full of knowledge with fun.Therefore, applying21stcentury as a complementary material to reading in class andafter class can stimulate students’ interest and enthusiasm, improve students’ readingability, and enhance students’ reading comprehensive abilities eventually.In the thesis, the author applied21stcentury in English reading teaching in seniorhigh school with the guidance of Textual Cohesion and Coherence Theory, MindMapping Theory and Content-based Instruction in order to test whether students’reading strategies and comprehensive ability can be improved through English newspaper reading training. The experiment which lasted for a term was carried out intwo parallel classes with fifty students each in Grade11. One was appointed as theexperimental class, and the other as the control class. Before the experiment, thestudents of the two classes were almost at the same level according to the results ofthe pre-test. In the experiment, the experimental group adopted21stCentury Teens(Senior Edition) as their complementary reading material in class and after class, andthey also received the above three methods supplied by the teacher. The control groupstill use the conventional way. Based on the results of the experiment and the dataanalysis, it was testified that English newspaper reading training can improvestudents’ reading strategies and enhance their English comprehensive ability.