A Correlational Study Between English Extra-curricular Reading And Senior High Students' Reading-Writing Skills

English extra-curricular reading is one of the important ways for independent learning,which in a certain degree affects students‘ overall language capacity.However,most researchers have just focused on the relation of extra-curricular reading with one single English skill;few have explored whether this type of learning activity exerts the same influence on both reading and writing skills.With this as its perspective,the present study conducts a further investigation into the effects of English extra-curricular reading.Based upon the contemporary Schema Theory and Stephen Krashen‘s Second Language Acquisition Theory,this survey chose the students of Jiangsu Nantong Pingchao Senior High School as the subjects to examine the correlation between extra-curricular reading with their English reading and writing skills.This paper was mainly aimed to study the following questions: 1)What is the overall situation of Senior High students' English extra-curricular reading? 2)Does extra-curricular reading lead to students‘ changes in reading-writing self-efficacy and behavior? 3)What is the effect of extra-curricular reading on students‘ reading level and writing level respectively?The author took Class(2)Grade Three as the experimental class,and Class(3)as the control class,each with 34 students.The experiment spanned one academic year(September 2016-May 2017),during which the experimental class read Helbling Readers(Grade Three)and The 21 st Century English Newspaper(Grade Three),while the control class continued the traditional model of English knowledge consolidation.The research mainly adopted the ?High school students‘ English extra-curricular reading questionnaire?,a revision of Yan Jiali & Han Baocheng(2007)‘s design,according to the subjects‘ English level and the goals of this study.Conducted as well are the pretest,2016-2017 Tongzhou High School Entrance Examination,and posttest,2016-2017 Nantong Third Simulation Test.Aided by SPSS 20.0 and Excel [2003] to process the statistics from the questionnaire and tests,this paper concludes that the reasonable planning of English extra-curricular reading can significantly improve the students‘ confidence and interest,help develop their good reading habits,and obviously better their English reading and writing performances.This empirical research is hoped to provide worthy reference for the teaching of English reading and writing at all levels.