| For understanding and absorbing language information, reading is an important way of input, therefore plays a decisive role in English learning. However, much attention of the traditional English teaching in Junior high school is paid to explaining language points, vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, while the students’ synthetic language analysis ability is basically ignored. This will hinder the development of students’ reading potential in the long run. However, the National English Curriculum (2011 version) in basic education emphasizes students’ overall development as the motivation and the goal of English teaching, thus making it urgent to find out a way as to how to effectively motivate students’ reading interest and at the same time improve their English reading skills as well as abilities, and a major concern of each teacher of English.This paper aims to explore a new form of English reading teaching in junior high school from the perspective of Multiple Intelligences (MI) theory proposed by Dr. Howard Gardner from Harvard University in the 1980s who points out that there are at least eight different intelligences for all normal human beings, namely: Verbal/Linguistic Intelligence, Logical/Mathematical Intelligence, Visual/Spatial Intelligence, Musical/Rhythmic Intelligence, Bodily/Kinesthetic Intelligence, Interpersonal Intelligence, Intrapersonal Intelligence and Naturalistic Intelligence. Each person has his or her unique combination of the eight intelligences with some strong and others weak. Teachers need to respect every student’s unique intelligence combination and exploit various teaching resources, teaching methods and ways of assessment in order to make their teaching beneficial to all kinds of students.Having studied MI theory and with some independent insight, the author conducted an experiment of nearly five months in junior high school in order to find out if the points meant in the following two research questions are efficiently dealt with.1. Whether MI-based English reading teaching can stimulate students’ English learning interest?2. Whether MI-based English reading teaching can improve junior high school students’ English reading proficiency?The author chose two classes of 97 students altogether in Grade 8 of Zhuhai No.9 Middle School with one of them as the experimental class (EC) and the other as the controlled class (CC). They were taught before the experiment by the same English teacher and had reached the same English reading level as proved by the pre-test (The test paper was carried out from final examination in Zhuhai City Board of Education in January,2014). During the experiment, the author taught the EC English reading through a new methodology based on MI theory and designed class activities in terms of students’intelligences; while the CC were taught in the traditional teaching method as before. The whole experiment was conducted with the research instruments such as questionnaires, pre-test and post-test. After the experiment, all the students involved in the experiment took the post-test (The test paper was adapted from final examination in Zhuhai City Board of Education in July,2014). Having analyzed the results, the author found through data analysis that the students in the EC had a significantly higher English reading proficiency than students in the CC. Moreover, the former had more interest in English reading than the latter.The results of this study demonstrate the effectiveness of MI theory applied to English reading teaching in junior high school. It is an effective way to improve students’ reading proficiency and stimulate students’ English reading interest. The author hopes that these findings are helpful in the promulgation of MI theory in China and provide references for teachers to design flexible classroom activities in English reading class under the guidance of MI theory. |
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