An Action Research On Improving Students’ Comprehension Of English Reading In Junior Middle School

English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2011 version) states clearly that the fundamental goal of basic English education is to develop students’ integrated linguistic competence, and to improve students’ mind development and their humanity accomplishment throughout the English study(MOE, 2011). Language is not only a tool for communication, but also a thinking instrument and the carrier of culture. During the process of English teaching, the teaching of reading should also undertake the important responsibility of cultivating students’ integrated linguistic competence. It requires teachers could not always put particular emphasis on the structures of language, they should pay more attention to the cultures and values of reading(Wang, 2012). At the same time, the language study needs large amount of input, and the diversified reading materials are especially important for students to learn English. Therefore, during the process of teaching, how to design effective interactive teaching activities is necessary for both students and teachers.The objective of this research is to find out the students’ major difficulties in English reading comprehension in junior middle school, and by analyzing the causes for these difficulties, the author conducts an action research which aims to help students develop their reading comprehension competence. Firstly, the students and teachers in Grade 8 in Luohe Foreign Language Middle School are involved in this research. According to the questionnaires and classroom observation, the students’ major difficulties in English reading comprehension are as follows.(1) During the teacher-students interaction, the questions that teachers designed are relatively simple and superficial. Students are generally not interested in English reading.(2) During the interaction between students and students, most students do not often discuss the relevant topics of the reading texts actively.(3) During the interaction between learners and learning materials, plenty of the students are still reading texts word by word, sentence by sentence, and they always consider that the inferential comprehension of the reading texts is difficult. Meanwhile, the students do not grasp the reading strategies systematically and their reading speed and accuracy rate of English reading comprehension are relatively far away from satisfaction.(4) In the interaction between learners and multimedia, students are interested in almost all the teaching activities which are used by the multimedia, but the teachers seldom use this teaching aid. Secondly, the author analyzes the causes for these difficulties, on the one hand, the teachers have not fully realized the essence and importance of English reading, their instruction of the reading strategies to students are not fully enough. On the other hand, the teachers’ teaching ideas only focus on the literal comprehension of the reading texts, while they neglect to cultivate students’ inferential and critical comprehension competence, it is not conducive for students to improve their integrated linguistic competence.In order to help students solve these difficulties during their learning of English reading, the author puts forward a research hypothesis to help students improve their reading comprehension competence by strengthening the interaction between learners and learning materials. And then the author makes an experiment in Class 5 of Grade 8 in Luohe Foreign Language Middle School for one semester. The data analysis and research results have proven the research hypothesis. During the process of this study, students have generally developed the awareness of searching for the relevant cultural background information and improved their predication competence. Because the author has designed a series of teaching activities to strengthen the interaction between learners and learning materials, most of the students have a deeper understanding of the reading strategies, they could design reading comprehension questions by themselves and even some of them could express their own opinions about the reading texts. All these changes have made students’ understanding of reading not only stays on the literal comprehension, but also focuses on the inferential and critical comprehension of the texts. These changes could help students to promote their English reading comprehension competence and have a positive influence on their development of integrated linguistic competence.There are five chapters in this thesis. Chapter 1 introduces the research background, research motivation, significance and the layout of this thesis. Chapter 2 presents the literature review and relevant theoretical basis. Chapter 3 provides the research design, including research questions, research participants, research instruments and procedure. Chapter 4 reports the analysis and discussion of the data in this action research. At last, Chapter 5 is the summary of the study, it mainly summarizes the research findings and results, meanwhile, it also states the implications and future prospects of the study.