Studies On The Illustration-based Reading Strategy In Senior High School

As an important part of Advance with English, the vivid and concrete illustrationshave a remarkable effect on English learning of the senior high school students. However,teachers nowadays pay little attention to the functions of the illustrations in textbooks.Against this background, the thesis attempted to explore whether illustrations in textbookscan better teaching strategies and improve students’ learning efficiency and communicativecompetence.Based mainly on Dual Coding Theory and Law of Cognitive Development, this thesisdiscussed the effective using strategies of illustrations in Senior English textbooks withquestionnaire investigation and experimental study in four senior high school classes. Themajor findings are as follows:1）Using pictures in reading was helpful to motivatestudents’ interest in learning English.2) It was beneficial to enhance the student’s memory,and to deepen their comprehension and the ability of using what they have learnt.Therefore, it improved teaching and learning efficiency.3) According to the analysis offinal-exam performance, great improvement happened to experimental group in multiplechoices, reading comprehension, task-based reading and writing. Compared with thecontrol group, the experimental group improved slightly in listening and cloze, but therewas no significant difference.Because of limited research experience，the author has only made a preliminaryexploration and analyses on the development and use of textbook illustrations. There’s stillmuch room for further research on the topic of improving the validity in the questionnaire,the scientific evaluation of teaching effectiveness，so that the statistics could be morepersuasive.