An Experimental Study On The Effects Of KWL Plus Reading Teaching Model On The Reading Comprehension Ability Of Senior High School Students

Reading class not only occupies a large proportion in English observed class but also accounts for the largest scale in students' English tests.Therefore,reading,as one of the four basic skills in English,is an important part of English learning and teaching.Nowadays,it is not uncommon to see that many English teachers in China,under the traditional reading teaching model,PWP,tend to play the main role in asking and explaining questions in class while their students are passively provided with the opportunities to respond to them instead of being allowed to raise their own questions.However,according to The English Curriculum Standards of Senior High School(Draft Version)in 2016,English learning is a process for students to construct meaning actively.Moreover,some studies found that reading comprehension ability is influenced by students' generation of questions during the reading process.Based on the situation,this study attempts to explore another reading teaching model,KWL Plus,which takes students as the center in the reading classroom,encouraging students to ask questions,and to solve the problems in reading.And the study also aims to investigate if the model can improve students' reading comprehension ability.Besides,the study gives a shot to enrich our teaching model.Based on schema theory and constructivism learning theory,this study explores the following two questions: 1)Can the application of KWL Plus reading teaching model improve students' ability in comprehending reading text? 2)Is there any obvious change in components of students' reading comprehension ability after applying KWL Plus reading teaching model according to reading comprehension ability relevant to levels of students' raised questions?The experimental study has been operated by literature review method and experimental method.Two natural classes were selected from Grade Two students of a senior high school in Guangzhou,Panyu District to serve as an experimental class and a control class during the twelve-week experimental period.Both classes shared the same teaching content,same English teacher and the same teaching progress but differed in the English reading teaching model.The KWL Plus reading teaching model has been applied in the experimental class while the traditional reading teaching model has been carried out in the control class.Theexperimental instrument includes tests and open-ended questionnaires contained with questions raised by students before and after the teaching experiment.All data would be put into the computer and be analyzed with SPSS17.0.The experimental results show that the application of KWL Plus reading teaching model can improve students' ability in comprehending reading text.It enlightens us that KWL Plus can be used to improve students' reading comprehension ability at the same time to enrich English reading models in China.Besides,there is an obvious change in students' components of reading comprehension ability according to the levels of students' raised questions after applying KWL Plus reading teaching model.Furthermore,students under this model,tend to raise more questions on inference level covering the ability of guessing the meaning of vocabulary through the context,making inference of the text through the clues in the article and getting the structure of the article through repeatedly reading the context and critical level which is relative to the ability of identifying the explicit affection,attitude,values,social and cultural phenomenon of the discourse than that cover the ability of catching the main idea and get the details of the reading materials for the reason that students may get more familiar with getting detail and catching main idea when apprehending the passage.