A Study On The Application Of MI Theory To English Reading Teaching In Junior Middle School

New curriculum reform focuses on quality-oriented for all students. It’s a topic tightlyconcerned that how to satisfy students’ needs and dig each student’s intelligence potential.The traditional English reading class is dominated by teacher’s explanation of languagepoints, neglecting students’ learning interest and the teaching of reading strategies. Thus,the author begins to deliberate how to design varieties of English reading classes tomotivate students’ interests and meet the needs of students as much as possible.The MI theory, which was put forward by Howard Gardner in his book Frames ofMind in1983, points out that all the normal human beings have at least eight intelligencesand everyone has a unique combination of the eight intelligences—everyone has differentstrong intelligences and weak intelligences. MI theory emphasizes that teaching methodsshould diversify to help students learn better and promote every student’s full potential.Teachers should respect every student’s unique intelligent characters and design morescientific and effective classroom activities so as to improve students’ multipleintelligences. MI-based classroom activities should stimulate their interests as well asimprove their English proficiency and at the same time, involve multiple intelligences tostimulate their potentials，develop their weak intelligences by using strong intelligences.Having studied multiple intelligence theory, the author conducted an experimentwhich applies MI theory into the teaching of English reading course. The author carried outthe experiment to research the following two research questions:Firstly, Will MI-based English reading teaching arouse students’ learning interestand improve their learning motivation?What’s more, Will MI-based English reading teaching improve students’ readingproficiency?Two classes in Grade8in Jinzhou No.5junior middle school were chosen as the EC (theexperimental class) and the CC (the controlled class) separately. The two classes hadalmost the same English reading proficiency and were taught by the same teacher beforethe experiment. During the experiment, the author taught the experimental class Englishreading teaching based on MI theory and designed class activities in terms of students’intelligence; while the controlled class was taught with traditional method. This experimentwas conducted through instruments such as questionnaires, interview, pre-test and post-testand so on. Having analyzed the results, the author found that students in the EC had more interest in English learning than the CC’s after four months’ experiment. What’s more, theformer had a higher English reading proficiency than the latter. The result of the post-testone shows that the mean score of EC and CC are respectively27.54and24.00, the value ofSig.(2-tailed) is0.000which shows that there is significance between EC and CC. Thefindings generated from the current research imply that MI theory can be applied toEnglish reading class in middle schools.