A Case Study Of Using English Newspapers In English Reading Class At A Secondary Vocational School

Reading is an essential part of English learning and teaching. To improve students’reading ability is one of the important aims of English teaching. Secondary vocationalschool (SVS) students in China are a special group of students, many of whom have poorreading performance. How to improve the effectiveness of teaching English reading toSVS remains a big challenge to the English teachers. Based on Krashen’s theory of secondlanguage acquisition and Schema Theory, the author carried out a study on Englishnewspaper-aided reading teaching in the reading class of SVS to explore its effectivenessand feasibility of developing students’ interest in reading as well as their reading ability.The21stCentury Teens (Junior3Edition) was chosen as the supplementary readingmaterials in the experiment.68students in a secondary vocational school in Suzhou werechosen as the experimental subjects.34students in the Experimental Class (EC)participated in reading English newspapers, while the other34students in the ControlClass (CC) were instructed in traditional teaching methods of reading and their readingmaterials were solely from their English textbook and workbook.The students in both ECand CC were given the same teaching periods and teaching scheduel.The author applied three methods in the experiment: the pre-test and post-test,questionnaires and interviews. The two tests (pre-test and post-test) were conducted in bothEC and CC during the experiment. The two questionnaires were also given to all theparticipants before and after the experiment. In addition, the author had a face-to-faceinterview with some students from EC to know about their attitudes towards theresearcher’s newspaper-aided reading teaching.The experimental results show that using English newspapers in reading class has apositive effect on the teaching of English reading to SVS. English newspaper-aided readinghas stimulated the students’ interest in reading, cultivated the students’ good reading habit,trained the students’ reading skills and strategies, and as result improved the students’reading ability. The author of the present research draw the conclusion that the application ofEnglish newspapers in SVS reading class can help arouse students’ interest in reading aswell as develop their reading ability. Hence, the experiment is of practical value to SVSEnglish teachers in using English newspapers to improve the effectiveness of teaching ofreading in China.