An Exploration Of The Effectiveness Of English Reading For Pleasure In Senior High School

Reading is one of the main aims of learning a language. For most Chinese students, English reading is the main way to expose themselves to English learning. Reading abilities as to reading and comprehending articles fast have been increasingly highlighted in National Matriculation English Test(NMET). So English reading plays a key part in English learning. Therefore, teachers try their best to make the students read as much as possible in and after class. However, because of the exam-oriented situation, the teachers require the students to read many articles that are seemingly good for them to improve their English grades but fail to appeal to the students, thus putting students under more pressure instead of pleasure in English learning and therefore stopping them from reading more voluntarily in the future. The present study tries to explore whether it is more effective to improve the students’ English proficiency by adopting the perspective of doing Reading for Pleasure. If the teachers can adopt the perspective of reading English for pleasure, they will systematically not only pursue varieties in their teaching strategies, making use of the present texts, finding different interesting materials, but also will devote themselves to finding ways to remove the difficulties in reading. The constant but not accident pursuit of reading combined with pleasure will surely stimulate the students to devote themselves to reading more actively not just to finish the reading as their work painfully, so that they have more chances to get familiar with the words and expressions and at last make them more confident in reading and improve their reading ability.Through conducting an experiment with the students in Senior 2 of a Middle School in Guan Du District, this paper tries to answer the three questions:① Can Reading for Pleasure increase the access to vocabulary and make iteasier for the students to increase familiarity with English words andexpressions?② Can Reading for Pleasure help the students improve their readingcomprehending?③ Can Reading for Pleasure make the students more interested in learningEnglish, especially in reading?Based on the findings in the experiment, some conclusions as well as implications for English teaching and learning are given. First, teachers should understand the significance of the Reading for Pleasure and try to create new element in reading training to stimulate the students to read actively. Second, teachers should shift their traditional perspective of reading training. Reading can be done happily not just in the form. Third, those students who have got lower marks can improve their English learning through Reading for Pleasure; meanwhile high-score students can get a better achievement in Reading for Pleasure.Finally, this paper points out the existing limitations and gives some suggestions, which remains to be thought about and improved in the future work.