A Study Of The Application Of Project-based Approach To Improving Student’s Reading Ability

Using Project-based approach in teaching English as a foreign language has been paidmore attention by researchers from home and abroad since the1980s; however, it has a shorthistory in China. We started to use this approach in English teaching at the end of the20thcentury. The project-based approach is an approach which focuses on students and demandsfrom students to employ all of their already known knowledge and resources to resolve theproblems in order to get the knowledge and skills. In this process, they can do it through teamwork or by themselves. At the same time, teachers should help them when they meetdifficulties. In the course of problem solving, the student’s motivation is fully aroused andthey have the desire to know more on what they are studying. The ability of a student’scooperation, creation, language competence and researching are all improved.Reading ability is getting more and more important nowadays. In the new junior highschool English curriculum standard, it clearly puts forward that the junior middle schoolstudents extracurricular reading quantity in eighth grade should be up to more than100000words. The new standard also requires teachers to exploit related curriculum resources and tomake students have many ways to get access to English. Based on the standard, most of thejunior high schools choose foreign famous books as the reading book. In that way, studentscould get a better understanding on the foreign cultures, customs and histories.At present time, teachers still use a traditional approach called “PPP”(presentationpractice production), which is a teacher-centered teaching approach. Students play in apassive way in the teaching procedure. It ignores students’ subjectivity and cognitive factorsand their ability to analyze problems. Therefore more and more educational scholars’ calls fora new teaching approach instead the old one.This study tries to apply a project-based approach in teaching reading to arouse students’motivation, interest and to improve their reading ability.The subjects are chosen from Li Yue middle school. They are all in grade seven. And thenumber is100. The author is going to use the method of questionnaire and experiment tostudy the application of project-based approach to improve the students’ reading ability. Theanalysis is taken by the software SPSS Statistics17.0. The results show that this approachimproved the learner’s ability greatly and they also find that students in experimental classmaster more on not just knowledge but the cultural awareness. The experimental classes arebetter than the students in control class about their reading ability.At the same time, in this experiment, some problems were encountered, which indicatethat the application of this approach needs to be used for a long term in the reading class.There are also some implications during the process, the author hopes these can provide some help to the further research and also can give some useful information for theapplication of project-based approach in reading class in middle school...