An Action Research Of Narrow Reading In Improving The Writing Ability Of Senior High School Students

Narrow reading, put forward by Krashen in 1981, is a reading strategy based on the theory of Second Language Acquisition theory and Schema theory. It refers to reading materials on the same topic, in the same genre or by the same author. Narrow reading has been paid close attention to by scholars and researchers in recent years. However, these researches mainly focus on the effect of narrow reading on reading and the introduction of its theoretical basis. Few of them study the effect of narrow reading on writing. Among the four basic language skills, writing seems to be the weakest for senior high school students. In order to improve senior high school students'writing ability, this research attempts to integrate narrow reading with writing. Students read narrow reading materials related to the writing topic, and then they apply the knowledge acquired from narrow reading into writing. And it is expected that some new ideas can be provided for senior high English writing teaching. Research questions of the action research are listed as follows.1) Can narrow reading improve senior high school students' writing ability?2) What aspects of writing ability can be improved after narrow reading?The action research lasted for sixteen weeks. The research subjects were 43 students of Class 10 Grade two from Fencheng High School in Shanxi Province. The reading materials were mainly from textbook, teaching reference books, internet and magazines. In actual class, students read materials related to the writing topic and did some exercises to consolidate the the information acquired from narrow reading. Then they applied these information into their writing. After finishing the writing task, the evaluation activity was conducted. The action research was divided into two stages. At the end of each stage, the writer made an investigation to find out students' feelings and existing problems in teaching, and then the writer made teaching reflections and did some teaching adjustments according to the feedback. The results of the action research were presented by the data analysis of writing scores, questionnaire, interview, classroom observation and teaching log.The results indicate that through the input of narrow reading before writing, students' writing ability can be improved. Students also make significant progress in vocabulary, content and text structure in writing. All in all, the teaching method of integrating narrow reading with writing is effective.Though there are some limitations in this research, it is still expected that some findings of this thesis can be shared with the readers and provide some suggestions for English teachers willing to make some alterations in their writing teaching classes.