Action Research Into The First-prize Class At Jiangsu Senior High School English Teaching Contest On Reading

This study was aimed to explore the first-prize class at Jiangsu Senior High School English Teaching Contest on Reading in 2016 through action research.The theories on which this study is based are Input Hypothesis,Affective Filter Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis.Its practical significance lies in two aspects:helping senior high school English teachers to draw more attention to research in action,research on action and research for action so as to improve English teachers' teaching ability in a reading class;and helping English teachers promote their professional development.The action research tries to explore the following two research questions:1.What should a teacher focus on during the process of input in a reading class?2.What should a teacher focus on during the process of output in a reading class?The participants of this study were the author himself and the students from Senior High classes in two four-star key high schools in Jinhu and Suzhou.The instruments employed in the research mainly involved teaching journal,classroom observation and interviews.The action research contained two cycles.The first cycle consisted of problem identification,plan making,plan implementation,assessments and reflections.The second cycle was made up of problem re-identification,plan re-making,plan re-implementation,re-assessments and re-reflections.The data was collected before class,in class and after class,throughout the process of the teaching contest and then analyzed by means of classification and comparison.The study has the following major findings.First,during the process of input,what teacher focused on changed from three issues to two issues:how to lead in and how to deal with the details effectively.The omitted issue involved the main elements of the narrative and its structure,for it was fairly easy for students to understand and find them.In terms of lead-in,a movie clip of The Pursuit of Happiness,whose theme was similar to that of A Father and a Son,was used to create a light-hearted atmosphere for English reading class and pave the way for students to understand the article.In terms of details,the author either asked his students to read the detail in a father's voice to feel the love or acted it out or analyzed the proper words in proper place like "craned his neck to look" to show the boy's curiosity.The reason for these focuses may help students feel personally on the scene and understand the details better.Second,during the process of output,teachers focused on three aspects:the proper activities to prepare,the right moment to interact and the creative homework to arrange.The moving story between the father and the son was so motivating and so impressive that the students voluntarily shared their own stories in class.So,the activity concerning sharing stories was a proper one which fit the material well.As to the right moment to interact,the most touching moment when a student was moved to tears by her hard-working and considerate father attracted the author's attention.The author got the right moment to comfort the girl,which not only impressed the girl and other students,but also minimized their anxiety of learning English.Finally,the author arranged two open assignments:enjoy the movie The Pursuit of Happiness and carry out the plan made in class with parents now or later.Not only can creative homework style bring freshness to students,but also encourage them to use English in their daily life.The limitations of the study were listed in three aspects.First,this study was tentative in nature,which could not be generalized to other reading classes,but required a systematic study in the future.Second,the contest regulations provided that the contestants were not supposed to communicate much with the students,which prevented the contestants from understanding their learning and actual situation better.What's more,the few timely feed-backs mainly came from the English teachers present in the classes,which may not be objective enough.Third,due to great pressure and hard work when participating in the teaching contest,the author couldn't record all the details.Although he tried to recall with the help of the videotape,he might miss some of them in class.