The Application Of Narrow Reading In English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Narrow reading refers to a strategy by which learners can improve their reading ability by reading books on the same topic,by the same author,and/or in the same genre.In the early 1980 s,Stephen Krashen and other linguists proposed the theory of narrow reading in second language acquisition.Today,this theory has been widely studied and applied by English teachers.It is supposed that the theory of narrow reading in English teaching can help students get through the difficulty of vocabulary memorizing,syntax and text understanding,and acquire the language effectively.In 1981,Krashen referred to the narrow reading firstly in the newsletter that he wrote to the TESOL Journal.In Krashen's opinion,it is beneficial for readers to come into contact with the same vocabulary,grammatical structure,discourse features and background knowledge,so as to reduce the difficulty of reading to some extent.Practice has shown that narrow reading helps to improve the learners' reading comprehension(Lamme,1976),vocabulary and interest(Kyongho and Nation,1989;Cho and Krashen).Many teachers believe that it is necessary to study the role of narrow reading in foreign language teaching.This thesis applies the narrow reading method into high school English reading teaching to explore its effect in reading comprehension.The study mainly verifies the relationship between the usage of narrow reading and high school students' English achievement.The experiment mainly includes two items: 1)whether the narrow reading model can improve students' reading performance;2)how the narrow reading model affects top students and underachievers in English class respectively.The experimental method is used in this study.And totally 112 students in class 18 and class 20 from Junan No.4 Senior High School were selected.They are all at senior one and the experiment lasted for one semester.Class 18 was the experimental group,while class 20 was the control group.And the experimental group was divided into two groups according to the grades.The experimental results were analyzed by SPSS software package.The results indicate that the narrow reading method can improve the reading performance of senior high school students,especially the reading achievement of underachievers.So in English reading teaching,in order to cultivate the students' interest in learning English and improve the overall performance of English,we can provide more reading comprehension excises to students according to the theme,writer and writing style.As an effective learning method,narrow reading has been used in all kinds of classroom teaching,and this experiment is an attempt to apply it as an auxiliary teaching method.The emphasis of my research is to improve the students' reading comprehension ability and their reading comprehension grades.However,in practice,the author finds that the teacher's supervision and examination of students' extracurricular reading are also an essential link.Narrow reading is only a method,which needs to be put into the teaching monitoring system to achieving the interaction between teachers and students,so that an effective teaching mode of reading can be established.