A Study Of Students’ Attitudes Towards Teacher Instruction Of Contextual Inferencing Strategy For Reading Classes

In order to investigate students’ attitudes towards Contextual Inferencing Reading Strategy instruction,and explore the change of the attitudes before and after instruction,this research adopted a case study,which was conducted in an International School in Shenzhen,and the participants were students studying English as a Foreign Language(EFL).This research was carried out by implementing a contextual inferencing reading strategy instruction,which lasted for 4 weeks in school.During the instruction,70 ten years old students of Grade 5 participated in the course,and 5 EFL students with different learning backgrounds from them were selected to have interviews and weekly journal writing with a researcher.In each class,the students were guided to know and use contextual inferencing reading strategies.Then the students practiced in group discussions to build teamwork and understanding.The data were collected from the interviews and weekly journals.Before the conduction of instruction,interviews with participants were carried out to get a priori idea about students’ attitudes towards contextual inferencing reading strategy instruction before the instruction and get data and evidence for the comparison after instruction.In the process of instruction,to ensure the truthfulness and reliability of the data,students were asked to write weekly journals after every week’s course.They were instructed to write down their knowledge and experiences they gained from the course and their attitudes and feelings on the use of a new reading strategy.Besides the post-interview,there were weekly journals and other data to compare.It is an effective way to understand the complex and deeper issues.Sometimes the gathered information could be difficult to explain.It included the participants’ feelings,attitudes of specific events and description of past experiences.Two kinds of interviews were conducted between the researcher and participants,both were done face to face.One was preinterviews,which were conducted before the instruction to get a priori idea on students’ attitudes before the instruction.The other was post-interviews.They were carried out after the instruction to gather more information based on the analysis of the journals and compare them with the pre-interviews.The data collected and analyzed from journals and interviews indicated that contextual inferencing is a helpful strategy for reading.The students presented a high level of preference for contextual inferencing reading strategy as following aspects:(1)Easy accessibility,(2)a friendly learning atmosphere,and(3)a good learning experience.Also,some suggestions on Contextual Inferencing reading strategy instruction were collected,including instruction period,reading materials,and so on.Meanwhile,through the comparison and analysis,the data of the two phases of interviews,found changes in students’ attitudes towards contextual inferencing reading strategy instruction,from known less to using it in reading and join the instruction positively.