The Application Of ESA Model To Senior High School English Reading Teaching

English reading is a significant approach to consolidate and enrich English language knowledge as well as acquiring information and comprehending western cultures.Hence,reading teaching has always been a vital portion of English teaching in school education at all levels,including senior high school.High school English teachers have made consistent efforts on stimulating students' engagement in English reading and promoting their reading proficiency.Nevertheless,daily English reading teaching nowadays in senior high school generally employs the traditional model,which considers knowledge transmission as the main task of English class.Current reading teaching tends to follow the model of listening to the tape,translating the text into Chinese,explaining language points,doing exercises and checking the answers.And it is the teacher that always keeps talking,thus the whole learning process is monotonous,boring and stylized.As a result,the ability of searching and processing information and the ability of combining language knowledge and language skills can not be trained.Therefore,this kind of teaching model severely restrains students' engagement in learning English,let alone promotes their English reading proficiency.In 1998,Jeremy Harmer,the British English education expert,first proposed the ESA model in his famous academic writing “How to Teach English”,which has injected new vitality into the reform of the English teaching model.Harmer put forward the three basic elements of language teaching in classroom.They are Engage,Study and Activate,which is referred to as ESA.No matter what contents are taught,three elements are indispensable,which will be present in all — or almost all — language classes.Harmer also introduced the three different ESA patterns by changing the sequence and combination of the three basic elements flexibly —Straight Arrows sequence,Boomerang sequence and Patchwork sequence.Compared with the English reading teaching in a traditional way,the ESA teaching model highlights the characteristics of the flexible teaching process,the adjustable teaching activities and pays close attention to study.The model focuses on students' principal role which are the center of classroom teaching and all teaching activities have to take into account the students' acceptableability,actual level,demand and interests.The model also emphasizes the flexibility of the teacher's role.The teacher is no longer the leader in the classroom teaching but the guide of students' learning and the organizer and coordinator of the teaching activities.Furthermore,the teacher provides their students with a positive learning mechanism,sufficient learning space and comfortable learning surroundings to get the students to do learning tasks actively by employing the ESA teaching model,which cultivates a more harmonious relationship in English reading class.The author found some problems of senior high students in the English reading learning class during the teaching practice,such as,low engagement in English reading,lack of the awareness of contacting and applying reading strategies and have insufficient interest in current reading teaching model etc.,and attempted to solve these problems by employing the known ESA teaching model and verify the feasibility and effectiveness of applying the ESA teaching model in senior high school English reading teaching.Therefore,this paper is based on the overview of the relevant research of the ESA teaching model and on the theoretical guide of the schema theory and constructivism,and uses the action research method to explore the answers of the following three problems: 1.Can the application of the ESA teaching model stimulate the students' reading engagement? 2.Can the application of the ESA teaching model promote students' language knowledge and improve their ability of reading comprehension? 3.What are the students' suggestions for the application of the ESA teaching model in senior high school English reading teaching? The research subjects were all the students of class nine in Grade one in the High School Affiliated to Shandong Normal University,where the reading teaching was conducted by the ESA teaching model.Such instruments as Students' Engagements in English Reading Questionnaire and Students' Opinions of The ESA Teaching Model Questionnaire and follow-up interviews were adopted in the whole process of the action research.Besides,the data had been analyzed carefully during the process of the action research and the research findings were based on the combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods.The research results show that: in senior high school,the ESA teaching model does have prominent active influences on promoting the students' engagement in English reading as well as a certain effect on enhancing the English reading proficiency.Moreover,the ESA teaching model focuses more on the flexibility of students' learning and the students' principal role and does alsosolve some students' problems existing in the learning of English reading.Through the action research in senior high school English reading teaching,it can be concluded that the ESA teaching model on solving these problems found in this action research teaching is really a feasible approach.This thesis also discussed the pedagogical implications and reflection of this research at the end.However,because of some restraints of conditions,some limitations and difficulties can not be ignored in the process of applying the ESA teaching model to the English reading classroom,so the research still remains to be further explored and improved.