Effects Of Graded Readers On Junior High School Students’ English Reading Proficiency: An Empirical Study

As stated in "The New English Curriculum for Chinese Primary Schools and Junior/Senior Middle Schools (2011), students in Junior Three should be able to read English reading materials of various genres, and the total amount of their extracurricular reading should reach up to 150,000 words. Meanwhile, reading consists an important part of an English test. Take the English Entrance Examination to the Senior High School in Hunan Province for an example, the reading section adds up to nearly 50% of the total scores. Therefore, how to improve students’ English reading ability is really a challenge we English teachers have to face up to.Based on Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and Affective Filter Hypothesis, this study aims to determine how English graded readers affect Junior Two students’English reading interest, expand Junior Two students’vocabulary and ultimately improve their English reading level. In order to achieve this target, Penguin Readers are provided as reading materials to the participants:50 Junior Two students from a middle school in Ningxiang County, and another 50 students are selected as the control group. Participants of the experimental group read the Penguin Readers for 20 minutes every day with no guidance or instructions, while the control group read the English paper "Students Times" for the same amount of time everyday. After the 13-week-long experiment, the statistics collected from the experiment show that students from the experimental group increased their English reading interest, expanded their vocabulary size and improved their English reading proficiency. This study proves that reading graded readers benefits a lot to Junior Two students in terms of English reading interest, English vocabulary size and English reading proficiency.This study gives hints to English teachers that they should provide an appropriate environment and condition to arouse students’English reading interest so as to improve their English reading proficiency.In consideration of the duration and the sample size of the study, we still have a lot to improve in future studies.And yet it provides a wider scope to cultivate Junior Two students’English reading interest and contributes a significant addition to the area of English reading instruction.