A Study Of Junior High School English Reading Teaching From The Embodied-cognitive Reference Point Perspective

To cultivate students’ reading skills is an important issue in English reading teaching in junior high school.English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022-year Edition)also clearly puts forward the requirements for the reading ability of junior high school students.By reviewing the literature,it is found that there are at least two main perspectives in the research field of English reading teaching.One is the cognitive perspective,which focuses on schema,metaphor and metonymy.The second is the text structure-based perspective,which is divided into macro and micro levels.The macro level emphasizes the authenticity and vitality of English reading teaching under the thematic meaning,and the micro level emphasizes the promoting effect of cohesive devices on the coherence of discourse.However,the reading teaching studies based on cognitive theory and the text structure analysis are isolated from each other,and it is necessary to combine them.For example,metaphor,metonymy and other main cognitive principles are important implicit cohesive ways to achieve the discourse coherence.Moreover,in the cognitive perspective,there are few even no explicit mention of attempting to apply the Cognitive Reference Point Theory to English reading teaching.Even fewer studies take into account the “embodied”foundation of cognitive mechanisms to analyze English reading teaching.As one of the basic cognitive competence of learners,“the embodied-cognitive reference point”,like metaphor and metonymy,plays an important role in reading teaching.In addition,it cannot be separated from participation of lived experience which plays a fundamental role in cognitive process.The Cognitive Reference Point Theory refers to the process of pointing to a target from a reference point at the cognitive level.This theory can be explained by Night-time Sky.There are millions of stars in the night sky,if we want to find a target star,we tend to use a bright,easy to find,prominent star as a reference point,then start looking for a less bright star that is not visible.There are also many cognitive reference points in reading.For example,we can take the theme of the discourse as a reference point and aim to understand the hierarchical structure,logical relations,author’s feelings as goals.Besides,we can take the clarification of the cohesive relations between words,sentences,paragraphs and the whole text as a reference point,to aim to promote the realization of grasping the thematic meaning,writing intention,writing ideas.The Embodied-cognitive Reference Point Theory which emphasizes full participation of physical experience is developed from the Cognitive Reference Point Theory.In this paper,The “Embodied” focuses especially on junior high school students’ lived experience,and the “-cognitive” refers to cognitive processing.The application of “Embodied”in “the Embodied-cognitive Reference Point Theory” in this paper takes students’ lived experience as the reference point and aims to promote the overall understanding of the events involved in the discourse.Based on the shortage of existing research,this paper combines the cognitive theory with the reading teaching based on the text structure,and attempts to apply the Cognitive Reference Point Theory to junior high school English class.This paper takes students’ lived experience,the theme of the discourse and the cohesive relationship between the words and sentences as the reference points,and takes the overall understanding of the discourse as the goal.The purpose is to explore a more effective reading teaching approach.Research questions are as follows:1)Whether the use of the embodied-cognitive reference point-based reading teaching method can significantly improve the reading level of junior high school students?2)What are the impacts of the embodied-cognitive reference point-based reading teaching method on students’ use of reading strategies?This paper takes two nature classes 903(CG: control group,41)and 906(EG:experimental group,40)as the subjects which have the same English level in grade nine of No.8 Middle School in Yichang City,Hubei Province.Two groups were tested for reading ability test and questionnaire on reading strategies before and after the experiment.After the experiment,some students from the EG were interviewed semi-structured.During the experiment,the EG was taught by the embodied-cognitive reference point-based reading teaching method,and professional terms were avoided in the teaching process.Examples from students’ familiar life are used to explain the concept of the reference point,such as physical reference point phenomenon,so as to help students to have a deep understanding of the theory.The CG takes the conventional teaching methods,and relevant interfering factors and variables were controlled as much as possible.The experiment lasted for 3 months.The data show that: 1)Introducing the Embodied-cognitive Reference Point theory into junior high school English reading teaching can significantly improve the English reading level of junior middle school students This is because this reading teaching method allows teachers to make use of the analysis of the reference point relations from the Embodied-cognitive Reference Point,so as to provide students with an effective way to combine individual information with overall information,integrate the information provided in reading into a coherent whole for understanding,and cultivate students’ ability to quickly identify topic sentences and keywords,and distinguish the main information and details.2)The impacts of the embodied-cognitive reference point-based reading teaching method on students’ use of English reading strategies are as follows:(1)it can promote students’ overall understanding of the content involved in the discourse based on their lived experience;(2)it helps to understand the textual level,the development of events and the attitude of the author according to the theme;(3)it helps to further grasp the meaning of the material based on the connection of words,sentences,paragraphs,etc.According to the research results and findings,this paper puts forward the following three teaching enlightenments: 1)Adding cognitive interpretation to the interpretation of reading materials to reduce students’ difficulties in understanding English sentence expressions due to different cognitive reference points;2)To carry out life-oriented teaching and integrate lived experience into English learning,so as to help realize the close relationship between English knowledge and reality and improve students’ abilities to use knowledge;3)Analyze the reference relations in the discourse and establish the relevance of the discourse,so as to facilitate the construction of the wholeness of the discourse.