An Experimental Study Of English Reading Teaching Model Based On Systemic Functional Grammar In Junior High School

Reading ability is one of the abilities of listening, speaking, reading and writing,so there is no doubt that reading plays a very important role. But in actual reading teaching process, most of the teachers still get used to teaching in the traditional way.They overemphasize the explanation of vocabulary, sentences and grammar points.Reading is regarded as the simple addition of isolated language items. Students’ cultivation of discourse reading ability is overlooked. Although Some teachers may have realized the importance, they do not know how to teach students in a proper way.As for students, many of them are afraid of doing reading tasks in real life because of various reasons. But items related to reading comprehension accounts for a large proportion in exams. Unsatisfied scores hit students’ confidence fiercely.In order to solve this problem, a lot of researches have been carried out. Reading models such as bottom-up, top-down, interactive model etc. all came into play and some of them are still in actual use. But every model has its own limitations and can not be put into use very well. So working out a suitable reading teaching model for junior high school students is becoming more and more important.Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar is thought as an important theory of discourse analysis. More and more researchers are trying to apply some of its theories into teaching practice. Relevant studies are easy to find in colleges and senior high schools, but the researches in junior high schools are relatively rare. Faced with this situation, the author tentatively designed a Systemic Functional Grammar-based reading teaching model on the basis of analyzing the current situation of the reading teaching as well as relevant literature of this field. In order to prove the feasibility of the model, the author carried out a 4-month-long experiment. Two classes which consist of ninety students of similar reading level are chosen randomly as the experimental class and control class. The two classes are taught by the SFG-based reading teaching model and the traditional way respectively. During this process, the author collects and sorts out the data of questionnaires and tests carefully so as to explore the effective way of teaching English reading that can raise students’ readinginterest and discourse reading ability.Through careful data collection and analysis, it is proved that the reading teaching model based on Systemic Functional Grammar indeed raised students’ reading interest as well as their comprehensive discourse reading ability.