A Study Of The Effects Of Jigsaw Method On Senior High School Students’ English Reading

Reading,as one of the main methods of language input,plays a very important role in the five skills of listening,speaking,reading,viewing and writing.At the same time,The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017)proposes that senior high school education should be an important phase for the development of students’ learning capacity.Besides,cultivating students’ ability to use learning strategies is a principal way of improving their learning capacity.Whether they can carry out cooperative learning activities independently is one of the important reference standards to measure the development of students’ learning ability.However,in the conventional English reading teaching,more attention is attached to imparting language knowledge with little cultivation of students’ reading strategies,leading to the slow improvement of students’ English reading ability.Therefore,this study attempts to integrate Jigsaw method into high school English reading teaching to explore its effects on English reading strategies and competences of senior high school students through experiment.Based on the Framework for Constructivism and Zone of Proximal Development,this study probes into the following two questions:1.What are the effects of Jigsaw method on the English reading strategies employed by senior high school students?2.What are the effects of Jigsaw method on senior high school students’ reading competences?In order to answer the above questions,108 students from two intact classes in grade one of a senior high school in Yueyang were selected as experimental subjects to conduct a 16-week empirical study.In the experimental class,the Jigsaw method was applied to the English reading teaching,while the control class adopted conventional teaching method.The data collected by English reading tests,questionnaires,interviews and other experimental tools were analyzed via the SPSS 23.0 software.The major findings are as follows: 1)Jigsaw method has an impact on the usage of English reading strategies of high school students.Cooperative learning environment is favorable to cultivating students’ use of reading metacognitive strategies and can partly change students’ reading cognitive strategies;2)Jigsaw method has positive influence on high school students’ reading abilities,which can improve the overall English reading performance of high school students in some degree.Compared with high-level and low-level students,the middle-level students have made more obvious progress.In conclusion,this study verifies the positive effects of Jigsaw method on English reading teaching in senior high school,hoping to provide some pedagogical implications for further English reading teaching.