| The percentage of reading comprehension in English for the entrance examination of thesenior middle school is very high. That means reading English is very important to success inthe subject of English. Therefore, reading teaching has been one of the main contents of theEnglish teaching in the middle school. This paper tries to explore that if groupwork as ameans of Cooperative Language Learning can help to develop reading ability. This paperfirstly introduces and analyzes the background of the chosen topic, reviews academic researchin this field at home and abroad and demonstrates the disadvantages of the present research.Secondly, as a learner-centered approach, the main characteristics and functions of groupactivities are discussed. Finally, this paper emphasizes to conduct the experiment----that is toprove if groupwork can improve students’reading ability. The subjects are the students of twonatural classes in the third year of No. Four Middle School in Yong’an,Fujian. Theexperiment did not randomly assign students to treatments. One class is the experimental andthe other one is the control. The author adopts both qualitative and quantitative methodologyin this study with an arduous effort in a pre-test and post-test and questionnaires. The softwareExcel was used to analyse the data. The result reveals that the reading ability of the studentsin the experimental class has been obviously improved by group work.The results of the experiment show that the groupwork as a student-centeredmethodology is different from the classical teacher-centered. After the training, on a readingcomprehension test, students gain higher scores, can complete the different types of thequestions of the test easier, and students’ reading abilities of word-guessing, induction,deduction and screening the information have been improved obviously. Especially, more andmore students are willing to participate in the English reading activities. |
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