The Comparative Study Between Word-text&Text-word Reading Modes For English Teaching In Senior High School

English teaching model for reading in middle school always begins from vocabulary,and then it processes to text understanding. With the new curriculum reform, manyresearchers and teachers are keen on exploring top-down and interactive models forteaching practice, and harvested affluent achievements. However, those brand new theoriesare rarely being applied to in-class practice. The way used mostly is still concentrating onvocabulary. It is true that vocabulary foundation is very vital for English learning, whileconstructing and improving reading skills and abilities for middle school students cannot beconfined in the scale of vocabulary. Through the experience of learning and teachingEnglish, the author of the thesis pondered over the effects of the two main teaching models,i.e. bottom-up and top-down approaches, with the puzzle: which is the better way toimprove reading ability, teaching new words before or after coping with comprehension?That is which would do better for cultivating reading ability for student, solving new-wordproblem before coping with the meaning of reading texts, or directly heading to reading.This study is designed to be conducted in two classes of Grade One in high school,one is experimental class and the other is control class. At the beginning of the experiment,these two classes were given a pretest in English proficiency. According to the results of thepretest and high school entrance examination, each class was classified into high-level,medium-level and low-level groups for future observation and comparison. Reading lessonsfor the control class were processed with traditional bottom-up model, that is, explainingnew words before doing reading comprehension test. While in the experimental class, areading comprehension test was proceeded before processing new-word learning activity.Sub-tests were conducted for several times during this one semester, and the results wereanalyzed with Independent Sample T-test with SPSS. The findings demonstrate that theoverall performances of two classes had no significant difference. Comparisons amongdifferent groups made at the end of all the tests prove that there were no significantdifferences. The implication of this research is that when training students to do Englishreading, teachers could pay more attention to cultivating students with reading skills andabilities, the new-words problem could be retained to be solved in later process.