| Reading is one of the main sources for the students to get information from the outer world. Successful reading can not only help students acquire the information but also help students broaden their horizons, improve their ability to analyze and solve the problems. At the same time, by reading, students can also get necessary language input, resulting in expanding the vocabulary, strengthening the sense of the language and at last improving the language proficiency. Therefore, reading teaching is the focus of English in the senior high school. Teachers are trying to explore the effective teaching methods to make the students successful readers.Content-Based Instruction (CBI) is an integrative approach with dual focus on language skills and content mastery. By making use of students’ background knowledge, the learning of subject contents provides students with lots of comprehensible input, speeding up the language learning and the improvement of listening, speaking, reading and writing.By shifting the focus from the teaching language itself to acquiring the language competence by learning the subject contents, according to Stryker & Leaver(1997), CBI stands out among so many language teaching methods and gains increasing popularity among the linguists and foreign language teachers. However, in China, the researches and use of CBI are mainly restricted to the universities. It is rare to see the empirical study of it in the secondary middle school. Besides, the contents in the CBI are all presented in the form of discourse, which makes it possible for the teachers to conduct the discourse teaching when presenting the contents in the classroom. In other words, during the classroom teaching, based on the discourse principles such as genre structures, the cohesion of the paragraphs and the coherence of the context, by guiding the students to read according to the macro and micro structures of the content, teachers can develop students’ability to acquire and analyze the information, improving the reading efficiency eventually.This thesis aims to explore a new effective reading teaching method by combining CBI and discourse principles by proving its effect in the English reading teaching. Based on the theories of CBI and discourse principles and the problems students have in their daily reading in the questionnaire survey, this study tries to explore how to carry out CBI in the English reading teaching classes under discourse principles and whether this new teaching method has any effect on students’ reading and how.To carry out the study, Class Two and Three Grade one in Zhejiang Chunhui High School are adopted as the study subjects. Class Two is the experiment class where reading teaching is conducted using CBI under discourse principles while Class Three is the control class where reading teaching is carried out using the traditional method. During the whole process, questionnaire, pre-test, post-test and interview are used to collect the data needed in the experiment. All the data collected are dealt with and analyzed by the means of EXCEL and SPSS, making the result more scientific and convincing.The results of the data show that the CBI under discourse principle, by involving the students in theme-based activities of different kinds enables students to expand their vocabulary and horizons, reduces the difficulty in understanding the content and gives them a sense of success, therefore, arousing their interest and motivation and strengthening their confidence in reading. What’s more, discourse knowledge taught in the reading classes helps to equip the students with reading strategies, get them into the good habit of reading and improve their reading speed and ability, laying a good foundation for their autonomous reading and self-study after class... |
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