The Application Of Newspaper-Aided English Reading In English Reading Teaching Of Senior High School

The New Senior English Curriculum Form Standards indicate that effective teaching resources should be used actively to improve senior high school students’ ability of learning and using English. However, the traditional English reading teaching is only confined to the textbook. There are some shortcomings for the textbook, such as, the limited vocabulary, the old content and the out-of-date information. Therefore, it is difficult to arouse students’ interest in English reading and activeness in autonomous reading after class and it is also hard to make students master some practical and effective reading skills. As a consequence, the improvement of students’ reading competence is restricted to a certain degree. According to Krashen’s Input Hypothesis theory, the ideal input should be comprehensible, interesting and relevant, not grammatically sequenced and abundant. Since English newspapers can provide students with fresh, updated, interesting and readable articles, they can be regarded as excellent teaching materials for English reading. Therefore, the researcher tries to apply newspaper reading to English reading in senior high school, which is to prove the effectiveness of the application of newspaper-aided English reading in English reading teaching of senior high school. The researcher is also expected to explore a practical and effective teaching method to improve students’ English reading competence. The researcher mainly adopts the experimental research and theoretical analysis to answer the following questions:1. What problems do senior high school students have in their English reading?2. How does the teacher lead senior high school students to overcome their difficulties in their English reading?3. What effects does newspaper-aided English reading teaching have on senior high school students’ English reading?This experiment took the 21 st Century Teens as an example and it was carried out in two parallel classes of Senior 2 in No.2 Senior High school of Shangshui, Zhoukou, Henan province for about four months. Class 12 was arranged as the experimental class while class 11 was arranged as the controlled class. During the process of the experiment, the researcher taught reading in a traditional method only by using the textbook in CC, while the researcher used the 21 st Century Teens for senior 2 as an aided material in addition to the same textbook in EC. In this experiment, the researcher employed the research instruments of materials collecting, materials analyzing, comparing researching, pre-test, post-test, questionnaires, the statistical analysis software SPSS17.0, etc.From the results of the experiment, it can be seen that most students’ reading problems have been solved in EC and the application of newspaper-aided English reading in English reading teaching of senior high school has some good effects on students’ English reading. It could be seen that the improvement of the students’ reading competence in EC was much greater than that of CC. It also showed that the number of students in EC who were interested in English reading had increased, and most students had cultivated autonomous reading habit and mastered some effective reading skills after the experiment. Therefore, the conclusion can be drawn that the application of newspaper-aided English reading in English reading teaching of senior high school is effective and has a positive impact on students’ reading competence. The newspaper-aided English reading teaching is worth further promoting in English reading teaching.