An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of Main Idea Identification Instruction On Senior High School Students' Reading Comprehension

Grasping the main idea of the reading materials is one of the skills required of Senior high school students in China.Language experts agree that effective and systematic main idea identification instruction is an important prerequisite for the obtainment of this ability.This experimental study is designed and carried out in accordance of category theory to investigate the effects of the main idea identification instruction on senior high school students' reading comprehension.A review of previous studies and my preliminary research have found that students who perform relatively poorly in the main idea identification have three things in common: inefficiency in differentiating super-ordinate and subordinate concepts of words.In other words,their ability to recognize important information in a text is relative weak;the reality of the lack of sense of text organization and structure of English reading materials,namely,the weak English text awareness on the part of students;lack of sufficient training in gist extraction,that is,they have not been taught systematically and effectively on how to extract the main idea of a text.This study focuses on two two questions: 1)What effects does main idea identification instruction have on the students' reading comprehension? 2)What effects does main idea identification instruction have on the students' ability to grasp text gist? And a statistical treatment soft ware SPSS18.0 was used to analyze the data collected from both pretest and post test.The study is conducted from the beginning of September in 2016 to the end of December in 2016 in DongJiang Senior High School,involving two parallel classes experiment lasts.In the study,the Experiment Class receives systematic main idea identification instruction based on category theory in English reading while the Control Class receives the traditional instruction,which guides students through activities such as guessing the the title,skimming and scanning the reading material quickly to find out the main idea in it.At the end of the experiment,a post-test is given to both classes.The test result shows the mean score of post-test is 27.4667 in the experimental class,and the mean score of post-test is 22.8889 in the control class.The results of the questionnaire and the follow-up interview of eight randomly selected students also show that main idea identification instruction has aroused their interest and confidence in learning English reading.