A Study On The Effectiveness Of Applying RT To Increase The Fluency In English Reading Of Junior High School Students

With the enhancement of the requirement in the New Curriculum for junior middle school students' English reading ability,a growing number of middle school English teachers began to focus on reading teaching. But what standard should be used to measure a middle school student's reading ability? Besides,what kind of Reading Teaching can be more effective to improve the reading ability of students?The two questions caused the attention of many scholars. And different scholars have a different point of view.In 1997, the US government set up the National Reading Panel (NRP), whose purpose was to study literacy teaching in the schools. At the conclusion of the study,the Panel identified five components that mesh together to form the art of reading.The five components are phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension (NRP,2000). Since then,the scholars began to see the five elements as a standard to measure the competence of reading and the five elements are referred to as Reading Fluency collectively. They also concluded, "Repeated reading and other guided oral reading procedures have clearly been shown to improve fluency and overall reading achievement". Oral reading has a lot of forms and the one recommended by many reading experts is Readers Theater.In Readers Theater, students rehearse and perform a short play in front of the audience, reading from a script during the whole time. The rehearsals provide the repeated practice which is necessary to increase reading fluency, there are so many opportunities for the students to repeat the script during the rehearsals, and as a result,students' reading fluency has improved consequently.. The Readers Theater concentrates on reading loudly and emotionally, which encourages students of all ages,all levels to practice reading fluently to their full and enjoy the whole process.This thesis aims to discuss the RT in the practical level, especially in the application of RT in the junior high school English reading teaching on the basis of predecessors' research. This study mainly discusses the following three questions: 1.What are those problems existing in the English reading fluency of junior high school students? 2. What are the junior high school students' cognition of the reading fluency and their attitudes towards the training of Readers Theatre? 3. What kind of effects does the practice of RT have on the junior high school students' English reading fluency?As for the conclusion, in the study I found that junior high school students have many problems in reading fluency, especially in the Reading Rhythm. Through the survey I found that many students cannot understand the accurate meaning of Reading Fluency. But as for the practice of RT, most of them show great interest. Through the method of empirical study, I found RT can effectively improve the English reading fluency of junior high school students. Due to my limited research level, the study is still in the initial stage. Both samples of experimental research and measuring tests are not enough. So I still have a long way to go in this study, and I sincerely need instructions from experts.