An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of Graded English Extended Reading On Primary School Students' English Reading Proficiency

English reading is generally believed to be an essential part of English learning.Therefore,in the primary school English teaching,English teachers put great importance on the development of students' English reading competence.But in the current English reading teaching in the primary schools there exists a serious problem.That is,the difference of reading ability among students in the same class is ubiquitous in the current class-based teaching organization form,while in the process of daily reading teaching,teachers always conduct their English reading teaching in accordance with their students' average reading level instead of taking their individual differences and actual needs into consideration.In consequence,the excellent students find reading classes boring and the “poor students” lose interest,confidence and learning motivation in reading for they often fail to finish the required tasks assigned to them.With this problem in mind,the author,enlightened by the individual differences theory,the zone of proximal development theory,and the input hypothesis theory,attempts to explore whether the graded English extended reading has positive effects on the students' English reading achievements as well as their interest in English reading.The author of the present thesis implemented a nine-week graded English extended reading teaching experiment in two parallel classes of Grade Five in **********.and took the class two as the experimental class(EC),the class three as the controlled class(CC).Before the experiment,a pretest for the two classes was conducted and the results were analyzed to check whether English reading proficiency of the students from two classes was at the same level.In the process of the experiment,control class adopted traditional reading teaching method,while the experimental class received the graded English extended reading practice.After the experiment,a post-test has been carried out in order to testify the effectiveness of the graded English extended reading practice.In addition,a questionnaire was used in the experimental class before and after the experiment to investigate the students' change in their interest in English reading.After the data collection,the author used SPSS 17.00 to analyze the results.Beside,the author of the present thesis also had an interview with some of the students in the experiment class.The results of the study show that(1)compared with the traditional English reading teaching method,the graded English extended reading instruction is more effective in improving students' reading achievements;and that(2)the graded English extended reading instruction is more likely to raise the students' interest in English reading.This study suggests that it is feasible to apply graded English extended reading instruction to the English reading teaching in primary schools.Also,the author of the present thesis hopes that the research may serve as reference for future research in this field.