A Study Of Integrated Model For Teaching English Reading And Writing In Junior Middle School

According to New English Curriculum Standards for Chinese Junior MiddleSchools (NECS,2011), the junior middle school students should gain certain basicknowledge in English and acquire the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.Among the four skills, reading and writing are the ones which can objectively reflectstudents’ comprehensive competences. In the recent English exams of the AcademicLevel Examination for Junior High School Students in Jinan City, the individualexamining parts for reading and writing take up46%in the whole test papers. As wecan see, both reading and writing should be paid much attention and regarded as theimportant steps in English teaching. But in fact, most teachers of English do notunderstand the close relationship between reading and writing very well. These twoare usually taught in separated ways and as a result, reading is generally attachedimportance while writing is commonly ignored. Since there is not enough training andlack of guidance from the teachers, many junior middle school students lose interestsin writing and they even fear to do it. Therefore, we can find lots of different kinds oferrors in students’ compositions.The author is teaching in Jinan Foreign Language School. It is one of theseventeen schools officially registered by the National Ministry of Education whichhave the qualification of sending their graduates to the top universities in Chinawithout requiring entrance examinations. This school drew up a project on September,2010named The Plan to Promote the Development of English Subject in JuniorDepartment of Jinan Foreign Language School (2010-2014). Based on therequirements of the project, the school organized a series of experimental activities inEnglish teaching reform. The Integrated Model for Teaching English Reading andWriting is listed as one of the most important activities. The author took part in thisteaching reform and possessed some original data.Guided by the theories of Second Language Acquisition, especially InputHypothesis and Output Hypothesis and the school reform goals, the author elaboratesthe inner relationship between reading and writing as well as the necessity ofintegrating the two. The author sums up the integrated model for teaching reading andwriting adopted in the research and explains the specific procedures. This thesisaddresses the following four questions:(1) What difficulties and problems do the junior middle school students have in English writing?(2) What’s the relationship between English reading and writing?(3) How can the integrated model of reading and writing be carried out inpractical teaching?(4) Can the integrated model improve the students’ English competences?Two English classes of Grade8in Jinan Foreign Language School took part inthe experimental activity. There were60students all together in the two classes, forthe English class is organized in small size in this school. The experiment lasted fourmonths also a term. Class A (30students) was selected as the experimental group andClass B (30students) was selected as the comparative group. The two classes wereconsidered as parallel classes and taught by the same teacher, the author. The studentsfrom the two classes acted or performed similarly at class, homework exams. Beforethe experiment, the author gave the two classes the pre-test, a questionnaire and aninterview to know the students learning in English and their difficulties and problemsin writing. During the experiment, Class A was taught in the integrated model andprovided with especially-designed learning materials which combined reading andwriting. Meanwhile, Class B was still taught in the traditional way which reading andwriting are trained separately. After the experiment, the author carried out anotherquestionnaire and interview in Class A to learn about the students’ attitude towards theintegrated model. At the same time, the post-test was carried out in both Class A andClass B. Based on the results of the questionnaire and interview, we can know thatmost of the students in Class A were willing to accept the integrated model and theypromoted their interests and confidence in English writing. The performance ofstudents in the tests shows that Class A has made bigger progress than Class B. Theintegrated model for teaching English reading and writing is proved to be feasible andeffective and it is helpful as well for the improvement of the students’ writingcompetence.Affected by various factors, this research also has some limitations. The numberof the subjects is small; the time is limited; there are still some steps need to bemodified and the instruments and data collection need to be improved. All in all, it is hoped that this thesis can arouse more researches in teaching English reading andwriting.