An Experimental Study On The Effect Of ECL-based English Reading Teaching On Junior High School Students’ Reading Ability

According to the English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(Version of 2022),teachers should select discourse reasonably,provide opportunities for students to interact with and experience different discourse types,encourage students to read outside of class,and focus attention on the development of students’reading literacy.The embodiment perspective on language emphasizes the experiential and cognitive aspects of language.Using embodied-cognitive linguistics to guide reading teaching cannot only thoroughly engage students’ senses and enhance the experience of information,but also emphasize students’ cognitive processing in the reading process.As a result,this thesis will examine the effects of English reading teaching based on embodied-cognitive linguistics on junior high school students’ reading ability and reading interest.Specifically,this research attempts to address these two questions:1)Can ECL-based English reading teaching in junior high school improve students’ English reading ability?2)Can ECL-based English reading teaching in junior high school increase students’ interest in English reading?In order to answer research questions listed above,this study conducted a teaching experiment,which used tests,questionnaires,and interviews as research instruments,and the study lasted roughly two months.The subjects of the study are 96 students in two parallel classes in the third grade of a junior high school in Foshan City,Guangdong Province.Two classes were served as the experimental group and control group,and the ECL-based reading teaching and the traditional grammar translation reading teaching were used respectively.After the experiment,SPSS 26.0 was used to analyze and discuss the experimental data.The results of the study are as follows:1)The pre-and post-experimental tests of the students in the two classes revealed that there were significant differences between the reading scores of the experimental group and the control group,and the reading scores of the experimental group were significantly higher than those of the pre-test.2)The questionnaire survey before and after the experiment and the post-experimental interview of the students in experimental group revealed that there were significant changes in the reading interest of the experimental group compared with that before the experiment.The experimental results showed that the ECL-based reading teaching has a positive effect on increasing students’ interest in reading.Meanwhile,compared with traditional reading teaching,it can more effectively improve students’ reading performance and reading ability.Through the analysis of the results,the research implications are drawn:First,reading teaching should focus on fostering students’ interest in reading by enhancing their experiential and cognitive understanding of language.Second,teachers should make good use of constructions in teaching and prompt students’ cognitive transition from concrete to abstract so as to train students’ reading ability.Third,teachers should strike a balance between experience and cognition.