An Action Research On English Picture Book Reading In Primary School

Pictures in the Picture Book are vivid and lively.Their narrative function is the same as the language,thus these pictures can be used as narration,lyrical expression and main ideas' revelation.Compared with plain text reading,the picture book reading is more intuitive and visualized,conforming to the cognitive ability and psychological characteristics of pupils.Pictures can imperceptibly stimulate the primary school students' reading interest.Therefore,it plays an important role in the improvement of students' thinking mode and language reading ability.Many developed countries,such as the United States,South Korea,and some developed areas in the developing countries,such as Guangdong,Beijing,have already learnt the importance of picture books and a lot of picture reading activities have been implemented both at home and in school.But in some third and fourth tier cities,activities of picture book reading are rare.Therefore,this paper tries to conduct an action research about picture book reading in Jingzhou,in order to study the method of and effects after carrying out this kind of activity in small and medium cities.The picture book used in this paper includes both printing ones and electronic ones,and the electronic picture books are in forms of PDF documents and video format.48 students of grade six in C primary school in Jingzhou,Hubei province are respondents of this research.Based on the class observation and questionnaire,it is perceived that the students have interest in English but they have no reading materials.Meanwhile,their oral English expressions are bad.Therefore,an action research on picture book reading activity has been carried out for four months,in the hope of using picture book reading activity to improve students' confidence and boost their interest in English.This research tries to deal with the following three questions:1)What kind of English picture books are primary school students interested in?2)How to organize English picture book reading activity?3)Is English picture book reading effective for English learning,especially for primary students' narrative ability enhancement and incidental learning of vocabulary and sentence?Qualitative research is the main research method in this study.Qualitative analysis can be done mainly by the means of interviewing,teacher's(researcher's)diary and transcriptions of students' story-retelling and homework,questionnaire and vocabulary quiz etc.Through the description of this action research and typical teaching episodes,the paper aims to reveal beneficial picture book types and the way to organize the reading activity in the most effective way.Meanwhile,the effect on students' narrative ability will also be explored through analysis of teacher's diary and transcriptions of students' story-retelling.The content and teaching activities will be adjusted according to the classroom observation.Two questionnaires are also adopted.The first one aims at finding out students' problems,and the second one tries to reveal their improvement.Besides,a vocabulary quiz is used to test students' incidental learning of words and sentences.The results show that what the students are most interested in are picture books close to their daily life and some fairy stories.Moreover,various kinds of group reading activities are effective to organize the picture book reading,like group games,group sharing and so on.What's more,picture book reading activity can arouse students' interest in English,boost their confidence and improve students' narrative ability,including three dimensions: the narrative structure,the narrative order and the narrative view.At the same time,reading activity can contribute to the vocabulary learning and some high-repetitive sentences learning.Various kinds of activities in this paper not only can inspire the future picture book reading,but also prove that English picture book reading can be carried out in the third or fourth tier cities.The writer hopes that the English picture book reading can be popular in more schools.