An Action Research On Reading Strategy Training In Junior High English Teaching

Reading is an important way for people to obtain information and knowledge.Having a good reading ability can help students cultivate language sense and contextual awareness,and also improve their comprehensive ability of language use.For junior high students,developing good reading habits,mastering appropriate reading strategies and increasing reading practice are effective ways to improve students' overall reading ability.Reading ability and reading interest have been a great concern in junior high English teaching.What's more,in the senior high entrance examination,the requirements for the reading ability are getting higher and higher.Thus,both teachers and students are eager to achieve a breakthrough in reading comprehension.However,many students have difficulty understanding articles and doing reading exercises.They lose many points and feel afraid of doing reading comprehension.This research is carried out in the form of action research.Based on her own classroom teaching practice,the author aims to see if reading strategy training can improve the reading comprehension ability and reading interest of junior high students through a series of teaching practices — discovering the problem,making a plan,implementing the plan,assessing the effect,revising the plan,etc.The participants are 40 students from Class 5,Grade 8 at Suzhou Jinchang Experimental Middle School.The students are given a 14-week reading strategy training from the 2nd week to the 16 th week,one lesson for each week and 14 lessons in all,including 12-week focused training and 2-week comprehensive training.The content of the focused training covers six reading strategies,i.e.,skimming,scanning,predicting,guessing,generalization and inferring.One reading strategy is trained every week,and two lessons are allocated for each reading strategy.After the focused training,six reading strategies are trained comprehensively.To answer the two research questions,this study collected three kinds of data: scores on two reading comprehension tests,learning log and interview.The pre-test was in the first week and the post-test was in the eighteenth week.The same paper was used for the two tests,which was the reading comprehension part from the final English test for Grade 8 students at Suzhou Jinchang Experimental Middle School.In the next week after the training was finished,i.e.,in the seventeenth week,all the students were required to write a reflective learning log(at least 300 words)in class to summarize what they had learned from the reading strategy training and report their extracurricular reading after the reading strategy training.In the eighth and nineteenth weeks,an interview was conducted with four students,whose scores ranked the 1st,the 11 th,the 22 nd and the 33 rd respectively on the pre-test.The major findings of this study are as follows: 1.In general,students' reading comprehension ability has improved,as evidenced by the increased scores on the reading comprehension tests;2.The reading strategy training has improved students' reading interest,which can be seen from these two aspects:(1)Students have changed their attitudes to reading comprehension.They became more and more interested in doing reading comprehension;(2)Students pay more attention to their extracurricular reading.They devote more time to reading comprehension.This study has some important pedagogical implications.First,junior high English teachers should pay more attention to reading strategy training.Second,in order to arouse students' reading interest,teachers should choose reading materials suitable for their students.Third,they can incorporate reading strategy training in their classroom teaching and design strategy-based tasks for students to practice.Last but not least,it is advisable for the teachers to offer more suggestions or guidance on students' extracurricular reading.