A Study On The Roles Of Extracurricular Reading Teaching In Developing Junior Students' Reading Ability

People acquire information mainly by reading comprehension,and it is seen as one of the dominating ways in English teaching.Therefore,reading teaching plays an important role in English teaching.It is proved that the effectiveness of the teaching of English reading has an enormous impact on English teaching.The major purposes of reading teaching are to cultivate students' capacities of autonomous reading and comprehend discourses by proficiently using of reading strategies.Vast reading text input is required to improve reading ability,however,nowadays the reading texts in junior English books are too simple and obsolete.In addition,teachers usually pay too much attention to grammars and language structures which get students bored.Thus teachers spend a great deal of time and energy on reading teaching while students show little interest and harvest a little.As a consequence,students lack background culture knowledge and can not use reading strategies to analyze discourses proficiently.Therefore,teachers need to choose appropriate extracurricular reading texts for students and meanwhile reform their reading teaching model.Based on surveys,interviews and experiments,combining Input Hypothesis and Schema Theory,this thesis introduces extracurricular reading into school English teaching as a routine and carries out a five-month experimental study of reading teaching.The thesis centered on three basic research questions:Firstly,what are the principles of selecting appropriate extracurricular reading texts?Secondly,which kinds of reading materials are helpful in developing students' reading ability?Thirdly,in which aspects can extracurricular reading help students improve their reading ability?The experiment is implemented through three phases.The study began with a questionnaire survey and a pre-study test.In the second phase,according to the analyses of the questionnaire survey,the writer trained students via extracurricular reading as supplements for reading teaching.Finally,an interview and a post-study test were carried out.The results of the experiment data suggested that extracurricular reading can arouse students' reading interest,enrich their culture background knowledge,expand their vocabulary,improve their English reading ability and comprehensive language ability.Throughout this thesis,the author found out that extracurricular reading is a great supplement to the current English textbooks and it plays an important part in the improvement of students' English reading ability as well as their comprehensive language ability.