On The Retelling Training To Improve Senior High Schoolstudents’ English Reading Abilities

Language knowledge and language skills are emphasized to achieve instrumental objects in English teaching. Along with the advocate of education of all-around development, students consolidate the language knowledge as well as the language skills. The English teaching in senior high school takes reading as an important and difficult part, but students find it hard to effectively deal with the comparatively complex texts in limited time by intensive reading, which is formed during junior high school. Retelling is often used in Chinese or English teaching in lower grades, as a means for teachers to check students’ understanding of the text. But in fact, retelling is an innovation which based on understanding, it synthesizes understanding, summary, memory and expression, and it benefits English reading of senior students to a certain extent.Considering the present situation of English reading in senior high school, the research was to explore the effect of retelling training to improve senior high school students’ English reading abilities. It toke Input Hypothesis, Output Hypothesis and the learning theory of Constructivism as theoretical base, and toke one hundred and twenty students of senior two in Suide No.1 Middle School of Shaanxi province as subjects. During the three months experiment, questionnaires and experiment were combined. The English reading teaching in controlled class had normal process as usual, and the experimental class added a retelling training. After the experiment, the reading situation of controlled class and the experimental class were contrasted, the questionnaires, the pre-test data and the post-test data were analyzed by SPSS17.0 to clear the difference between two classes.The result reflected that students prefer extra-curricular retelling materials with vivid stories, they like to do retelling tasks with partners or in group forms, and the most frequently used methods are Key-words and Outlining. Retelling training helps students in English reading understanding, and it has a more demonstrable effect in answering indirect questions. Thus, retelling is an effective way to improve students in English reading.