A Study On The Effects Of Sustained Silent Reading On Senior School Students' English Reading Comprehension

With reading playing an increasingly important role in English teaching,more and more teachers are searching for some more efficient teaching methods to stimulate the reading interest and motivation of the students,which in turn helps improve their scores in reading comprehension,among which,the Sustained Silent Reading which enjoys great popularity in English teaching abroad is gradually introduced to English reading class in China.The Sustained Silent Reading,different from the traditional reading teaching which focuses more on analyzing grammar and syntax,paraphrasing long and complicated sentences and simply understanding the literal meaning of the text,attaches greater importance to the reading interest and flexibility,therefore,it is helpful to have great effects on strengthening high school students' reading motivation and reading competence and is warmly welcomed both by teachers and students.Reading is one of the most important skills in foreign language acquisition.The empirical study in this thesis attempts to testify the hypothesis that the instruction of the Sustained Silent Reading in the classroom setting has positive effects on improving senior high school students' scores in different reading questions as well as strengthening their reading interest and motivation.The study is in an attempt to deal with the following three questions:(1)After the intervention of the Sustained Silent Reading,is there any significant improvement in the students' reading total scores in the EC compared with those in the CC?(2)Does the Sustained Silent Reading contribute to promoting scores in five different reading questions?(3)Does the Sustained Silent Reading strengthen the students' reading interest and motivation?This thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter 1 makes an introduction to the background of the study,the purpose and the significance of this thesis.Chapter 2 presents related researches to the Sustained Silent Reading abroad and in China.Chapter 3 makes an introduction to the definitions,classifications and the theory framework of the Sustained Silent Reading,the functions of which include it can stimulate the students' reading interest and motivation as well as promote reading fluency and accuracy.Chapter 4 presents the research design,including the research questions,the participants' description,teaching activities and experiment procedures.Chapter 5 concerns about the data collection and result analysis.Finally,a conclusion is drawn in Chapter 6 presents some limitations and implications of this research.The experiment started from September 2017 and ended in November,2017,the participants were 75 senior three students from two regular classes of Lanzhou Oriental Middle School.They were randomly designated as the Control Class and the Experiment Class.In this experiment,the Control Class were taught in the traditional teaching method through the whole period.At the same time,the Sustained Silent Reading program was introduced to the Experiment Class.Two exams were carried out respectively before and after the experiment,the data of the pre-test and post-test were collected and then were analyzed by SPSS 19.0.The results showed that there were no significant difference in reading total scores and five different reading questions' scores between the two classes in the pre-test.However,in the post-test,whether in terms of the reading total scores or in terms of the five different reading questions' scores of EC,they were significantly higher than those of CC except for the reading question of meaning guessing.In addition,according to the data analysis of the questionnaire,the application of SSR in EC has positive effects on changing the students' reading motivation and interest,which in turn enables them to read actively and voluntarily.On the whole,the research shows that employing SSR program in English reading class and cultivating the good habit of reading contributes to the improvement of reading scores and the positive change of the reading motivation.The experiment verifies the feasibility of SSR in senior school English reading teaching.It is beneficial to the improvement of the students reading scores both in terms of reading total scores and in terms of five different reading questions' scores as well as the positive change to the students reading interest and motivation.Admittedly,some limitations still existed in this study,such as the short period and only a small number of participants,it has yielded some useful findings which are considered to have great implications for later foreign language learning and teaching,especially in the reading area.