An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Jigsaw Teaching Strategy On The English Reading Comprehension By Higher Grade Students Of Primary School

Reading is a language learning process combining consolidation of the original knowledge and introduction of the new content. The English Curriculum Standard for stage of compulsory education proposes: primary English teaching should focus on reading and writing while developing listening and speaking, so as to improve the pupil's linguistic competence. Reading ability is one of the most important linguistic competences. To improve pupil's English reading ability is the most effective method for enhancing teacher's teaching efficiency and student's learning efficiency. Some researchers have realized the importance of reading in learning English and they have made some researches on reading teaching strategy aiming to improve learners' reading interest and reading ability. However, most of the related studies are focusing on middle school students or college students. Seldom researches have been conducted on English reading teaching strategies for primary school students, especially through the group Cooperative Learning method.In each of the 2014 edition text books for Guangzhou primary school students, 50% of the units are in the form of passage. In order to help the students learn those boring passages better, teachers need to provide more interesting and efficient learning method. For this reason, this study, adopting Jigsaw Cooperative Learning method put forward by American professor E. Aronson in 1978, was designed to conduct a four-month empirical research on two classes of higher grade in a primary school in Guangzhou. The two chosen classes with equal English learning performance were taught by the author, one as experimental class while another as control class. In this study, the experimental class was taught with jigsaw cooperative teaching method, while the control class was taught with the traditional method. This experiment aims to study the effect of jigsaw teaching strategy on the English reading comprehension of students. It tries to address the following two questions:(1) Can Jigsaw teaching strategy improve the English reading comprehension of higher grade primary school students?(2) Can Jigsaw teaching strategy increase students' interest in reading English passages?Through analyzing on the data collecting from interviews, questionnaires, observation and reading tests, the author found that students are interested in jigsaw teaching strategy, as such kind of communicative learning method can increase their interest to read English passages. Secondly, the comparison of reading test shows an improvement as a result of conducting the jigsaw teaching strategy in English reading lesson.Based on the above, the author found that jigsaw reading is an efficient teaching method for primary school students. It is worth to promote on the English reading lessons for higher grade students.