An Application Of Dual Coding Theory In The Teaching Of English Reading In Senior High School

Reading is important in high school English teaching, and it has a large proportion in the college entrance examination. However, with the influence of traditional teaching method, reading just puts emphasis on words, sentences, and grammar knowledge, having no positive effect on the students' reading comprehension. Some reading theories such as bottom-up theory, up-down theory, interactive theory and schema theory put much emphasis on linguistic factors in the reading process but they ignore the nonverbal factors, which are fairly important in the reading process. Therefore, The thesis is an empirical research to the high school English reading teaching with the DCT to guide the reading teaching.Dual Coding Theory is a cognitive theory, and it is first put forward by Paivio in the seventies, who believes our human brain consists of two representational systems. One is verbal system, and the other is nonverbal system. The verbal system deals with language, while the nonverbal system processes the nonverbal objects. The thesis attempts to use the nonverbal factor to do the empirical research in the process of reading comprehension.The research subjects are two parallel classes with one semester teaching experiment. The thesis uses three kinds of experimental tools(Testing papers, free reports, and an interview) for data collection and analysis. In the teaching process, CG are under the traditional teaching method and EG are based on DCT.The data collection results of EG and CG are collected in the pre-test and post-test with SPSS. The thesis is to answer the two questions: Firstly, does Dual Coding Theory have a positive effect on reading comprehension? Secondly, does the teaching method based on DCT can arouse senior students positivity in English reading? Research results show that reading comprehension in EG has improved obviously according to the comparison of pre-test and post-test. In addition, through the interview, the method based on DCT can arouse the enthusiasm of students in reading comprehension and they become much more active in English reading classes. As a result, it can be seen that the theory of dual coding is helpful to high school English reading.