An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Inquiry-based Teaching On High School Students' English Reading Ability

Inquiry-based teaching is such an activity that under teachers' necessary guidance,students grasp necessary inquiry ability to reach the nature through autonomous participation of knowledge acquisition process;form the scientific concept at the same time;then cultivate the active attitude to explore the world.It is student-centered and emphasizes students' autonomous inquiry learning,in which teachers serve as organizers,coordinators and facilitators.The key content of the research is to investigate whether inquiry-based teaching can improve high school students' English reading ability.This paper adopts the 5E Model as the research instrument and makes researches on two parallel science classes to see how inquiry-based teaching affects high school students' English reading ability,to be more specific,how inquiry-based teaching affects high school students' English reading performance and English reading strategies.The 5E inquiry-based teaching model is used in the experimental class while the control class is taught in the traditional grammar translation teaching method.Before the research,a reading comprehension test and a survey on English reading strategies are conducted both in CC and EC,and its results are compared with each other.After the research,another reading comprehension test ant the same survey on English reading strategies are carried out in both classes and its results are compared with each other as well as with its previous ones.After a period of four month teaching experiment and with comparisons of the data collected from the pre-and post-reading tests and the surveys,it is shown that there is an obvious improvement of reading performance in EC but little improvement in CC,and the students in EC use more reading strategies more effectively than those in CC.It is found in the research that inquiry-based teaching is effective in improving students' reading performance,developing their reading strategies,improving students' language discourse ability and cooperative learning ability.Due to the limited number of the research subjects,the limited time of teaching experiment and some other uncontrollable factors in the research process,the conclusion still needs more evidence and further investigation.But in teaching practice,teachers ought to facilitate students' autonomous inquiry learning,promote independent study and cooperative study and encourage self-reflection and peer-evaluation in order to improve students' language ability and the ability to find and solve problems both in learning and real life.