An Empirical Study Of Application Of Content-based Instruction To Senior English Reading Teaching

Reading as a crucial part in English learning at high school plays an irreplaceable role in accelerating students’ language competence that has a close correlation with mutual development of the other three major language skills, such as speaking, listening and writing. Therefore, there have been a lot of experiments from variety of perspectives of teaching concepts and approaches conducted to explore the possible accesses to an effective acquisition of reading ability.The study attempted to demonstrate the feasibility of application of the Content-based Instruction (CBI) to English reading teaching at high school based on the principles of TBLT, since CBI which organically integrates content learning with language skills on the basis of comprehensible input, has drawn increasing attention to the researches in English reading teaching, though not enough at high school. The main aim of this study was to examine how CBI can promote comprehensible input so as to develop students’ reading ability, and how operative and effective the process would be in the guidance of the principles of TBLT.The participants for this study consisted of 66 Senior Three students at a senior high school in Huzhou, who were taught English reading with CBI under the principles of TBLT. Data of the study was collected by using reading tests, questionnaires, and interviews. Descriptive analysis and paired-samples T-test analysis were adopted to make a comparison of the results in pre- and post-test, so as to address each of the main concern in this study.Results obtained from statistical analysis showed that (a) through one-term experiment, students’ reading comprehension got promoted and enhanced on the aspects of discourse, main idea, summary, inference and total reading comprehension performances; (b) CBI can help realize comprehensible input by increasing students’ interests and confidence in reading, providing diverse texts around the same theme or topic, giving opportunities for negotiation of meaning; (c) the principles of TBLT, which mainly plays a pedagogical role and CBI, which mainly plays a linguistic role can work jointly and effectively in the process of English reading teaching.