An Empirical Study On College English Reading Teaching By The Effective Use Of Context Theory

This research project aims to explore new approaches of English reading teaching by the effective use of context theories in terms of linguistic angles in order to improve college students’ English reading abilities effectively because reading skills play a vital role in English language learning and teaching.Context is an important concept in the study of pragmatics, which was first put forward by Malinowski, an anthropologist from England in 1923. According to Malinowski, the speech patterns and environment are inseparable, the language environment has an important influence on understanding the meaning of speakers or articles. With the development of linguistics, numerous experts and scholars have applied context to teaching practice, and they have achieved some achievements. On the basis of numerous experts’ research, this thesis applies the context theory to college English reading teaching. The effectiveness of this teaching method has been confirmed by the following teaching experiment.The experimental study was undertaken in Liaoning Industrial Institute, Jinzhou City, Liaoning Province, China, from March to June 2014. Ninety sophomore students in Arts Department, selected as research participants, consisted of the experimental class and the control class. Forty-six students in the experimental class were taught by using the context-based reading teaching method, while 44 students in the control class were taught by the traditional teaching method continuously. Research instruments in this study included questionnaires, tests, interviews, and so on. All the data were analyzed using qualitative and quantitative techniques as appropriate. SPSS(Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) was used for the statistical analysis of the experimental results.The experiment shows that English reading teaching under the guidance of context theory can improve students’ reading strategy and scores, and it also can alter students’ attitude to reading. Therefore, applying context theory to college English reading teaching is feasible, and it is expected that college English teachers can be enlightened by the result of the study in terms of these English reading teaching methods, so as to improve their students’ reading level efficiently. This study is of great significance, particularly in the Chinese current context, in terms of the enlightenment of the further research on English language learning and teaching. In the final part of this thesis, pedagogical implications are discussed and some suggestions on further research are also proposed.