An Application Of Context Theory To English Reading Teaching In Junior Middle School

It has been proved that reading is an essential way of language input for English learners. Students can not only get useful information but also obtain language knowledge during the reading process. Therefore, reading is a basic skill and an important way to learn English well. English reading teaching in junior middle school is even significant because it is very crucial for students to form a good reading habit, grasp an effective reading method and lay good foundation for their future study in this learning period. According to the New English Curriculum Standard of junior middle school, the main target of reading teaching is to cultivate and improve students’reading skills and abilities.However, the present English reading teaching situation of junior middle school is not optimistic. One of the most typical problems is that students can read and understand each word’s meaning in a text but still can not catch the exact meaning of a whole text. Obviously, it due to that many teachers only focus on analyzing the grammar points and sentence structures of the articles in English reading teaching classes while they neglect to cultivate students’context awareness. Consequently, students are lack of the ability of taking advantage of all the available contextual clues to grasp the exact meaning of the article.Since British linguists Malinowski firstly proposed the context theory, many linguists and scholars have done a lot of researches on context from various perspectives. They share the same view that context is an indispensable factor for language use, any articles have to rely on a certain context. Hence, the significance of the application of context should not be neglected. In fact, most studies just focus on applying the context theory to English vocabulary teaching. But there is almost no research applied the contextual teaching method to reading on the low level learning period. Thus, this study is dedicated to probe into whether applying the context theory to English reading teaching in junior middle school can improve students’reading competence. Specifically, this thesis attempts to answer the following two research questions:Firstly, in which aspects does the context affect the junior middle school students’ability of English reading comprehension? Secondly, what are the effect and significance of applying the context theory to English reading teaching in junior middle school?This thesis is an empirical research which combined the quantitative research method (questionnaire, pre-test and post-test) with the qualitative research method (interview) together. The core of this study is a comparative teaching experiment which was carried out among116students of grade8in Shenzhen Luohu Foreign Languages School from a control class and an experiment class. It should be noted that the contextual reading teaching method was only applied to the experiment class while the control class still adopted the traditional reading teaching method during the11weeks’ teaching experiment. The software SPSS19.0was used to collect and analyze the data from both pre-test and post-test. This study mainly draws the following results:firstly, context can affect junior middle school students’English reading comprehensive competence in the following aspects:guessing the new words’meaning, identifying the referents and the reading speed. Secondly, the application of context theory to English reading teaching in junior middle school can improve students’reading comprehension achievements, build up their confidence, stimulate their interest, increase their reading speed, and even improve their abilities of reading comprehension.Due to a few external and internal factors, there are still some inevitable limitations in this study which need to be eliminated by the further researches.