The Effect Of Sustained Silent Reading On Senior High Students' Reading Competence

Reading is the key to English teaching,and is also among crucial English learning skills.Unlike the current reading teaching,sustained silent reading focuses on analyzing grammar and syntax,paraphrasing difficult sentences and understanding the literal meaning of the text.Teaching process is still teacher-centered cramming education mode,which fails to strengthen high school students' reading motivation and reading competence,making the effect on reading comprehension far from ideal.Therefore,high school English reading teaching needs to be improved.Based on the current situation of reading teaching in domestic high schools,sustained silent reading which enjoys great popularity in English teaching abroad is introduced to English reading class,to develop students' interest in reading as well as their reading competence.In this thesis,100 students of senior three in two regular classes in Rudong Senior High School were chosen as experimental subjects.One class served as the experimental class,and the other class as the controlled class.The students in two classes had relatively the same English reading competence and were given the same teaching periods.The experimental class adopted traditional teaching method of reading along with sustained silent reading,while the controlled class was instructed in traditional teaching method of reading and reading strategies acquired by doing some reading practice.The author mainly applied two methods in the experiment: the pre-test,post-test and interviews.In the experiment,the author conducted the pre-test and post-test on reading competence of the students of two classes.Meanwhile,the author compared and analyzed the results of the tests.In addition,the author had a face-to-face interview with some high-score students and low-score students from the experimental class to know about their understanding of the importance of sustained silent reading,the current situation of application,and their opinions about sustained silent reading.The experimental results show that sustained silent reading in reading classes has a positive effect on English reading teaching in high schools.Sustained silent reading isconducive to improving students' ability to summarize the main idea of a text,the ability to understand the details and facts,the ability to infer and judge,and the ability to paraphrase some expressions.Furthermore,in the experimental class,sustained silent reading is more helpful for high-score students to improve their reading competence.