An Action Research On Improving Rural Junior School Students' Reading Competence Through Extracurricular English Reading

English reading is a complex process involving language knowledge and language skills.The input of enough extracurricular English reading materials is fundamental to improve students' English reading competence.And the improvement of reading competence is also closely related to the students' interest in reading,their reading habits,the teachers' reading guidance,and even family education.It requires all-around cooperation to help students achieve the progress.In order to improve the reading competence of English language learners,many researchers at home and abroad have carried out various relevant studies in theory and practice,generally to high school students and college students with more self-discipline.Their researches are generally on how to improve learners' reading skills or reading strategies or the effects of different reading materials on them.There is not much research on how to effectively carry out extracurricular English reading activities among junior school students.In view of this,the author aims to carry out an action research on the effect of extracurricular English reading on the rural junior school students.This thesis makes much use of a series of works on extracurricular English reading,English reading comprehension and the teaching of English reading,combined with the theory of Krashen's input “i+1” and the autonomous learning theory.Two research questions are as follows:(1)How can the extracurricular English reading be integrated with the curricular teaching?(2)What effects does the extracurricular English reading have on readingcompetence of rural junior school students?Based on the actual teaching situation,this thesis designs an action research among Dongnan(Nantong,Jiangsu)Junior Boarding School students.After finishing Questionnaire 1,the author makes the first cycle of action research from,September2017 to,January 2018.Meanwhile,according to the students' reading level,the author selects humorous Short Stories for Comprehension as the main teaching material and21 th century English and Reading for Junior and so on for auxiliary reading with interactive reading activities and strict reading time to arouse the juniors' interest in extracurricular English reading for the purpose of improving their reading competence.The author analyzes the result of the action research based on the interviews,questionnaires and the scores of two exams.The second cycle takes place from,February2018 to,March 2018.The data is collected mainly through questionnaires,interviews,reading records and tests.Judging from the results,setting up English extracurricular reading courses in a purposeful and planned way can not only guarantee the students' effective reading so as to improve their competence to decode the text,expand their language knowledge,improve their reading comprehension and enhance their cultural awareness,but also stimulate their interest in further reading and class English,especially,their awareness of autonomous reading.Some students even ask for more relevant reading materials in order to broaden their horizon by increasing the quantity of extracurricular English reading.This action research takes place in a small range and further research should be conducted in larger samples.However,the author hopes that this research can shed some light on the English teaching of the rural juniors and provide some reference for further studies on extracurricular English reading.