A Research On Improving Students English Reading Competence By Newspaper Reading In Senior High School

The New Senior English Curriculum Standards indicates that richteaching resources such as audio-media, newspapers, magazines, and theinternet should be made full use of to expand the ways of learning and usingEnglish. However, the traditional English reading teaching is confined totextbooks so that the improvement of students’ reading competence isrestricted to a certain degree. Therefore, it is necessary to exploit newteaching resources. English newspapers are regarded as an excellentteaching material because they can provide students with fresh, updated,interesting and readable articles.The author did a relevant research on whether English newspaperreading can be complementary to the textbooks, stimulate students’ readinginterest, develop students’ reading strategies and finally improve students’reading competence. The research was carried out in the researcher’s twoparallel classes of Senior2in No.1middle school in Jining for about fourmonths. Class2was arranged as the experimental class while class18wasarranged as the control class. The researcher employed three researchinstruments to collect data, including pre-test and post-test, questionnairesand an interview. In the control class, the researcher taught reading in atraditional method, while in the experimental class, besides learning thesame textbook, the subjects were required to read English newspaper in andafter class under the guidance of the researcher. The results of the pre-testshowed that between the control class and the experimental class there wasno significant difference before the experiment. After about four months oftraining, improvement of the students’ reading competence of theexperimental class was much greater than that of the control class. It alsoshowed that the number of students who are interested in reading has increased, and most students have mastered some effective readingstrategies after the experiment. Therefore, we can draw a conclusion thatEnglish newspaper reading contributes to improving students’ readingcompetence and is worth further promoting in English teaching.