Application Of Peer-assisted Learning Strategies To The Teaching Of English Reading

Peer-assisted Learning Strategies(PALS)is a teaching strategy based on the possibility of peers' support,aiming at improving the individual reading level and organizing reading learning according to concrete procedures.China's National English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education suggests that teachers should help students form English learning strategies that can effectively improve learning efficiency,so it is particularly important to strengthen the instruction of learning strategies from the beginning of English learning in primary schools.A great number of studies have shown that PALS can effectively improve students' English reading performance.However,in the grade-four teaching of English reading in primary schools,the effect of PALS has not been verified in most cases.The author has implemented PALS in the grade-four English reading teaching in a primary school,and verified that PALS can effectively improve the grade-four students' English reading performance.This research focuses on the following three questions:(1)Can PALS help improve the grade-four students' performance in regards of English reading?(2)Does the application of PALS facilitate peers' English reading collaboration?(3)What is the grade-four students' attitude towards PALS?The subjects are 98 students from two classes of grade-four from a primary school in Jinning.In order to test the impact of PALS on the reading performance of grade-four students,the author divide the two classes into two groups: one class is the control group with 49 students,and the traditional teaching method is adopted to teach English reading;the other class is the experimental group consisting of 49 students using peer-to-peer learning strategies for English reading.According to the characteristics of peer-to-peer learning strategies,the students in the experimental group are divided into 24 pairs for paired reading activities.This study uses the pre-test-experiment-post-test method,as well as the classroom observation method before and after the experiment.Through an 18-week experiment(three times a week),the data will be collected and analyzed by SPSS(Statistical Package for the Social Sciences,version 17.0).The major findings of the present study can be presented as follows:(1)The comparison between the pre-test and the post-test of the experimental group indicated that PALS can effectively improve the grade-four students' performance of English reading,with the significant improvement of the mean scores.(2)The application of PALS facilitates peers' English reading collaboration,especially in the instrumental and emotional interaction.(3)The grade-four students in the primary school have a positive attitude towards PALS.The study also points out the weaknesses of this research: the number of the subjects is fairly small;the representativeness is not strong;the experiment may not last long enough to assess the long-term effect of the intervention.This research holds that the following aspects of PALS in the primary school should be improved:(1)working out a sound evaluation system for better intervention effects;(2)tracking longitudinally the English reading performance in the experimental group;(3)further optimizing the intervention details of this strategy in reading teaching,which will address the weaknesses in this research.This study may have some implications for English teachers in other primary schools to explore more effective and appropriate reading teaching methods in the future.