Improving Junior Middle School Students’ English Reading Comprehension Through Systematic Reading Skills Training

In the teaching experience as an English teacher, the author has foundthat the students have already realized reading is a very important skill forEnglish learners, especially for the beginners. And in Junior Middle Schoolsin China today, people know that reading comprehension ability is one of themajor goals in the English study. In fact, students may meet lots of new wordsand may feel difficult to understand the meaning while reading. Many JuniorMiddle School students’ reading ability is far below where it should be, andthe discrepancy between them is also great. So the author thinks that in thedaily classroom teaching activities, it is necessary for teachers to introducesome practical reading skills gradually to the students to improve theirreading abilities.This paper is to research and analyze the situations of the knowledge inreading and reading skill use for students of Tumd Left Banner of Hohhot.Two classes of Grade Eight from No.2Middle School of Tumd Left Bannerwere taken as the subjects, one as the experimental class and the other as thecontrol class.50students of the experimental class took a three-month readingskills training while the other50students of the control class still hadtraditional teaching for three months. It indicates that systematic reading skillstraining really does good to the students’ reading comprehension. Both of thetwo classes filled out a questionnaire before and after the training procedure.Besides, all the subjects took a pretest and a posttest. The scores of the testswere statistically analyzed by SPSS. We’ve got that the students who hadreading skills training performed better than those who received traditionalteaching on a standardized reading test. And the more skills the students use,the more positive attitude towards English reading they have. At the sametime, we’ve also found their main reading barricades and the reading skillsthey lack. After the experiment, we gave out some useful suggestions to helpthe students not only realize where their reading difficulties were, but learn to adopt the proper reading skills to deal with the problems, and even developtheir abilities to find and solve the problems by themselves. Therefore thisstudy benefits greatly on the improvement of the reading ability and theautonomy in language learning for students in Junior Middle Schools in thelocal area.Five sections are included in the paper.Chapter One is a brief analysis of the studies related to the currentimprovement of Junior Middle School students’ reading ability.Chapter Two is about some literature reviews that introduce someimportant theories in the research of reading skills, focusing on the factorsthat affect the definitions of reading skills, the classifications of reading skillsand the choice of reading skills. All the theories mentioned in this chapter aretheoretical support to the study of the paper.Chapter Three introduces the procedures of the experiment.Chapter Four is concerned with data analysis and findings from thequestionnaire, the reading comprehension tests and the experiment itself.Chapter Five is a conclusion. The author gives some discussions toelicit some solutions to the reading problems and states the major implicationsin English reading training and learning, and the limitations of the study arealso mentioned here.