| It is well known that the language environment is essential for foreign language learning.Therefore, it is difficult for Chinese students who are lack of linguistic context to learn English well. So far, the shortage of the language input has become a big problem in the English teaching in China. Reading as the main means of the input seems significant in language study and it seems to be a breakthrough point to solve the problem of English teaching.According to the latest New English Curriculum Standards (NECS, 2011) for Junior High Schools, students are required to read more than 290,000 words after class (level 3: 40000 words;level 4: 100000 words: level 5:150000 words). Besides, Reading Comprehensive takes up more than one fifth in almost all the English test papers in junior high schools including Zhejiang High School Entrance Exam, which has set higher requirements for students and teachers. In order to complete the teaching task and help students get higher scores in English exams, English teachers emphasize intensive reading a lot, and they spend much time and effort teaching the strategies of reading by using the textbooks. They ignore the instruction to the students' extracurricular reading and the feeling of the students. What's more, the limited vocabulary and old reading materials make the students lose interest in reading.In this thesis, the author will study the teaching of English reading based on the model of"Literature Circles", explore its effect on junior high school students' interests in English reading and verify whether it raises students' English reading ability and enlarges students' vocabularies,to prove "Literature Circles" is an efficient way for students to read. Thus, two classes of students of Grade Seven from Haining No.2 Middle School are taken as subjects. Class Two is the experimental class (EC) and the "Bookworm Series" are chosen as the training material. 28 students from EC are taught for one class every week based on "Literature Circles". However,Class One is set as the control class (CC) and 27students from CC are instructed in the way of traditional teaching model. Both EC and CC are arranged with the same schedule and reading assignment in one term. In addition, two questionnaires, two tests (including vocabulary and reading comprehension) and one interview carried out before and after the experiment to the two classes are collected and analyzed. The result of the experiment shows that "Literature Circles"reading teaching model can to some extent stimulate the students' interests in learning English and impel them to make full use of their free time to read more materials. This reading model not only improves the students' English reading level and enriches the students' extracurricular vocabularies,but also has a significant effect on the training of students' ability of autonomous learning and the initial formation of the team cooperation consciousness.The study is to offer a new and effective reading teaching approach to English teachers in junior high schools. Although there are some limitations with "Literature Circles" Model which will be discussed and improved in the future, the author expects more teachers to pay attention to the instruction of students' extracurricular reading and to apply the model of "Literature Circles"into the English reading teaching in junior high schools. It's believed by the author that it's the best time to start English extracurricular reading teaching from junior high schools. |
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