| Reading is one of the four necessary social skills for English learners in senior high schools. However, this important language input for senior high school English learners mostly comes from the English textbooks and classroom. Only a few students take some initiative to find some reading resources and engage in reading in their daily life. Most of them just read what is required. Based on the principle of CLT (communication language teaching), the aim of reading is to cultivate students’ language competence and to help them to be a fluent reader in a society. However why have they become passive readers nowadays? The educators and professionals are trying to find the reasons and ways to address this issue. Likewise, this thesis tries to investigate the effects of authentic materials on converting the decline of students’ engagement in reading based on previous studies.This study focuses on the China’s senior high school learners. The aim of this study is to explore possible the effects of authentic and non-authentic materials on their reading motivation and comprehension (it takes "ability" as the meaning of comprehension in this thesis.) by the method of questionnaires and an experiment.There were 48 students in Class 6, Grade 2 and 49 learners in Class 9, Grade 2 from the affiliated high school of Huazhong University of Science and Technology taking part in the research as the participants. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, the two classes were designated randomly as experimental class and control class. Before the research, the same pre-tests of reading comprehension were employed in both classes.During the research, experimental class was administered to the authentic materials selected from the Internet whereas control class was given the ordinary reading materials edited by Chinese. After the research, a questionnaire survey developed by Allan Wigfield and John Guthrie was distributed to the two classes to measure students’reading motivation and the same post-tests (which were different from the pre-tests, but both were at the similar reading level) were used to investigate the effects of the authentic materials on learners’ reading comprehension. The whole research took two months during which the whole class was taught by the same English teacher (the educator is the researcher’s tutor, Mrs. Guo,in the affiliated high school of Huazhong University of Science and Technology). And in experimental class, she offered some background knowledge related to the materials before doing the reading and discussion after every day’s reading. However,in control class,students only received the conventional reading analysis after the reading. And then the data collected before and after the implementation of authentic materials and non-authentic materials was analyzed through SPSS21.00 and Microsoft Office, Excel 2010.The results of this study show that the utilization of authentic materials in senior high schools is an effective way to motivate students to read and improve their reading comprehension. The application of these materials is effective. Especially when they are utilized with teachers’ careful selection of authentic materials and with guidance like offering background knowledge and analyzing the complicated words and sentences before reading. After the research was conducted, the students in experimental class showed a higher degree of improvement in the terms of both reading motivation and reading comprehension.This study explored the effects of authentic materials on senior high school English learners’ reading motivation and reading comprehension. It may enrich relevant theories of foreign language learning study in this aspect. It is also hoped that it will provide some inspiration to English teachers when they are teaching reading. |
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