The Relationship Between Extensive Reading And The Improvement Of Autonomous Learning In Junior High School

For Chinese students of English, four factors are of vital importance to their progress as listed here:contextual experience, communicative needs, sufficient input and interactive communication. Due to the present situation in China, however, there is no need for them to communicate with each other in English to meet daily demands of life, and thus they are not engaged in sufficient practice in speaking English. To ensure sufficient English input, therefore, reading English materials is becoming more and more important. Extensive reading entails a great deal of reading strategies and, more importantly, autonomous learning. The purpose of the present study is to find out the relationship between extensive reading and the development of autonomous learning.The subjects in this project are junior students in Grade Eight from Liqing Middle School in Putian. Class Eleven serves as the experimental group, and Class Twelve, as the controlled group. In the experimental group, the teacher trained the students’ability of autonomous learning by assigning sufficient extensive reading, while the controlled group is taught in a traditional method in which the teacher does most of classroom talk in class. After two terms’ experiment, students’ reading ability and their English level are compared between the two classes. In addition, some students were interviewed with regard to their changes in their ability of autonomous learning. The result shows that to improve the students’ autonomous learning ability by extensive reading is more effective than through the traditional teacher-centered teaching method. Autonomous learning and extensive reading are closely interrelated and interactional.