An Experimental Study On Theme-based Instruction In Senior High School English Reading Teaching

The National English Curriculum Standards for High School(2017)points out that with the development of economy and society in China,high school students' English proficiency needs further improvement.English teaching in senior high schools shoulders the responsibility of improving students' English proficiency,for which inputting comprehensible material contributes.Reading is the main way to increase comprehensible input.Nowadays,a variety of reading teaching modes coexist,all of which aim to improve the teaching and learning efficiency of reading.However,there still exists the phenomenon of disassembling reading materials in English reading classes,only devoting to the explanation of grammar knowledge and ignoring the cultivation of students' reading strategies.In order to solve the problems in high school English reading class and improve the efficiency,the researcher tries out Theme-based Instruction.In Theme-based Instruction,knowledge and practice of the second language are conducted around a theme or topic.Learners acquire the second language through exposure to a large number of second language texts related to a theme or topic,and obtain new information about various themes or topics.In the 4-month experiment,two parallel classes are randomly chosen in a rural high school of Hebei Province as the research subjects,the experimental class with 60 students,and the control class with 63 students.Theme-based Instruction is applied in the experimental class and the Grammar-translation Method is applied in the control class.Questionnaires,test papers and interview are adopted as research instruments.The data obtained from the experiment are analyzed by SPSS19.0.Through the questionnaire,the researcher found that the frequency of high school students' use of reading strategies is weak.After the experiment with Theme-based Instruction,the frequency of students' use of reading strategies is improved.The test paper and interview further prove that the reading achievement of students in the experimental class has been significantly improved through the reading strategy cultivation of Theme-based Instruction.