Study On The Improvement Of Primary School Higher-grade Students’ Reading Efficiency Through English Picture Books

Picture books represent a unique visual and literary art form that engage youngreaders in many levels of learning and pleasure. Picture books are designed forchildren with limited language proficiency to learn, to read and to have fun. Apicture book is a text written in simple and direct words and the illustrations serve tocomplete the text.Reading is not only a main form of input but also one of the cores of Englishlearning and teaching as well as an important skill which must be taught and trained.With the development of primary English course, the English reading teaching hasreceived increased attention. While, affected by the traditional teaching concepts andconditions, the primary school higher grade English teaching is facing multipledifficulties and challenges. How to improve students’ reading efficiency becomes amain issue in the teaching.The thesis aims to explore the application of English picture book assupplementary material in teaching and check its effects on improving students’reading efficiency. In the meantime, the thesis discussed the following issues: thecriteria of picture book selection for higher grade teaching; the effective integrationof English picture book and the text book; and the suitable strategies for picture bookreading and teaching. On the basis of the experiments’ results, the thesis attempted toprovide some insights, implications and suggestions to picture books reading forfurther study and teaching.The methodologies adopted in this study include literature review, teachingexperiments, questionnaires, interview and so on.90students from two classestaught by the author are chosen as subjects in the experiments. The two classes wererandomly divided into the experimental class and the control class. Before the study,the author did the questionnaires about the situations of reading teaching andstudents’ reading. During the experiments, the author carried out differentexperimental questions on different aspects which include the presentation ofreading materials, the teaching schedules, the processing way of vocabulary and theapplications of reading strategies. Pre and post tests were carried in the fourexperiments to ensure the validity. Based on the analysis of results of the fourexperiments, the thesis came to the conclusions:English picture books accord with primary scholars’ cognitive characteristicsthat could be applied in English reading to improve students’ reading efficiency.Reading English picture books is effective in stimulating the students’ readingmotivation and interests, improve their confidence in English reading. Thesuccessful reading experiences help foster sustainable reading interest. Englishpicture books reading is effective in enlarging the vocabulary and improvingstudents’ reading ability. As teaching aid English picture books fit into primaryschool’ English teaching integrated with textbook to achieve maximum teachingeffectsThe selection criteria for picture books is based on no excessive burden onstudents. Selection criteria for picture books are based on the three aspects concerned in teaching instruction: students, teaching, picture book and supporting resources.Picture books with proper teaching strategies and skills are conductive improvingstudents’ reading efficiency...