An Experimental Study On The Application Of Context Theory In Reading Teaching Of Higher Vocational Education

Teaching English reading has always been an important aspect of English teaching forteachers and a hard aspect of English learning for students in Higher Vocational College. Theimprovement of English reading requires teachers to create language circumstances. If thereading passage is taught in isolation mainly by the method of translation and explanationwithout context knowledge, the students may still get an unsatisfied result after a lot ofpractices have been done. With the growing demands of English learners’ reading ability, howto implement the Context Theory to improve the students’ reading comprehension becomes aproblem which English teachers often faced with.This research mainly focuses on the feasibility, maneuverability as well as effectivenessof the application of Context Theory in Higher Vocational College English reading teaching.The teaching experiment is taken in Liaoning Polytechnic Vocational College, which is lasting4months.68students in grade one from two classes took part in the experiment. The authorrandomly assigned the two classes to an experiment class and a control class. The teaching inexperimental class is under the direct of Context Theory, while in the control class theteaching is directed by traditional teaching method. Descriptive statistics is adopted in thisstudy through the analysis on experiment data by using the SPSS software. The experimentresults show that the students in experiment class make better achievements on Englishreading than the students in control class do and the context knowledge has a great effect onstudents’ reading comprehension.Base on the experimental data, the author got the conclusion that relative contextknowledge has a great effect on students reading comprehension process. The reader can do awell reading when he/she hands and makes good uses of the context knowledge in readingcomprehension process. So, in Higher Vocational College English reading teaching, in orderto improve the students’ reading competence, the teacher should pay more attention onimproving language practical ability, focus on expand students’ the context knowledge,enlarge their reading material with different styles and help them master reading skills andstrategies.