An Action Research On Reading Circles In High School English Reading Teaching

According to the General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(2020revised edition),teachers should assist students in integrating in-class and out-of-class reading learning by ensuring that they participate in at least 40 minutes of out-of-class audio-visual activities each week and read at least 2,500 words each week for a total of at least 100,000 words.However,students’ lack of English reading motivation and inadequacy of English reading abilities make it difficult for them to complete the curriculum’s required amount of reading.In light of the aforementioned circumstances,this study attempted to incorporate Daniels’ reading circles into intensive English reading in a senior high school,with the goal of exploring the changes in the students’ English reading motivation,and English reading ability and validating the rationality of the steps in the application of the modified reading circles in teaching English reading in high school by answering the following two research questions: 1.What is the effect of the application of reading circles on students’ English reading motivation? 2.What is the effect of the application of reading circles on students’ English reading ability? and which aspect of the students’ English reading ability has the significant change?Questionnaires,interviews,tests,and teacher reflection journals were used with a class of 48 Grade One students from a high school in Chongqing during a two-month action research project.Questionnaires and the teacher’s reflective journals were used to investigate the effects of reading circles on the students’ motivation to English reading.After two months of reading circles,the researcher used two tests and one interview to examine the changes in the students’ English reading abilities.The researcher came to the following key conclusions after analyzing the data in the investigation using SPSS22.0.First and foremost,the students’ deep and achievement motivations improved dramatically,while their surface motivation decreased.Additionally,the students’ English reading abilities have been enhanced.The average score growth rates for summarizing the main idea,as well as making judgment and inference,were increased significantly,indicating that the students’ ability to analyze passages from a discourse perspective significantly improved.Finally,the aforementioned findings indirectly validated the rationality of the researcher’s modified steps for implementing reading circles in high school English reading classes.Reading circles,in general,may have a favorable effect on senior high school students’ English reading motivation while also improving their English reading abilities from a discourse perspective.This study may serve as a guide and reference for teachers regarding how to implement reading circles in daily English reading classes in senior high schools,as well as encourage additional teachers to experiment with reading circles in other types of classes in the future,in order to promote reading circles as a regular teaching method.