A Research On The Promoting Effects Of Reading English Classic Literature In Senior High School: The Constructivist Perspective

Reading plays a very important role in English teaching and learning, in which English listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translating are an organic whole. During a long period, how to cultivate and improve English reading skills has been a critical problem in English teaching and learning. While aiming to solve the problem, both teachers and students prefer to choose writings of argumentations, expositions and so on rather than choose classic English novels.This paper, based on the theories and teaching approach of constructivism, aims at demonstrating the necessity and the importance of reading classical English novels in senior high school, and explore some effective teaching principles and strategies for English reading skill by experimentation. And this paper tries to find the research results by questionnaires, pre-tests and post-tests.This paper is composed of six chapters.Chapter One mainly deals with the significance and purpose of this research, as well as the necessity and the importance of English reading.Chapter Two mainly focus on literature review, which introduces the domestic and oversea researches that has been done.Chapter Three presents the basic theoretical knowledge of the study, as well as some important terms relevant to literature and English classic literature.Chapter Four is about the research design, and explains the principles of selecting materials, then briefly presents the selected materials, finally analyses research questions and research objects. This chapter emphasizes the process of the experiment, that is, students read English classical novels by the reading strategy of ’ whole in and whole out’, with the instructions from the teacher and the mutual assistance from the companions. This strategy which is operated in the experimental class is compared with the traditional strategy which is used in the comparative class.Chapter Five elaborates the analysis of teaching results with the help of questionnaires, pre-tests, and post-tests. With the help of SPSS 19.0, this chapter tries to find the correlation between the training of reading English classic novels and the improvement of students’ reading skills.Chapter Six puts forward the research results. The main results of the research are: 1) reading English classical novels in the initial grade of senior high school can improve the students’ English reading capability. 2) Reading English classic novels in the initial grade of senior high school can help the students comprehend the cultural background knowledge of the English-spoken countries, and then improve their humanity accomplishment.