The Application Of Sustained Silent Reading In English Reading Teaching In Transition Stage From Junior High To Senior High School

Reading is an important and essential approach for English learners to acquire knowledge and input language.The distinct feature of General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(published in 2017 and revised in 2020)is to put forward subject core literacy.On the basis of this background,students should be offered enough,proper and various reading materials to meet the requirements of English abilities.Whereas,there still are many problems in reading teaching of the transition stage from junior to senior high school.For example,many teachers still adopt a“teacher-oriented”teaching method and pay more attention to explaining the language points rather than cultivating students’ various reading abilities.Therefore,the educational experts have carried out many attempts to reform English reading teaching in recent years,and find that Sustained Silent Reading(SSR)not only can offer students a chance to acquire abundant reading materials and practice reading skills,but also can make up for the deficiency of traditional English reading teaching in satisfying students’ demands,stimulating their reading motivation and expanding their scope of knowledge.The paper will explore the application of SSR in English reading teaching of the transition stage from junior high to senior high school.Guided by input hypothesis theory,autonomous learning theory and reading motivation theory,the study conducts a teaching experiment for 19 weeks.It selects100 students from two parallel classes of a high school in Bengbu City,Anhui Province as research subjects.The study applies SSR into experiment class(EC)with48 students,but applies the traditional reading teaching method into control class(CC)with 52 students respectively.It aims to answer the following two questions through the experiment:(1)What effects does SSR have on reading motivation and reading strategies of the transition stage from junior to senior high school students ?(2)Whether SSR can improve the English reading ability of the transition stage from junior to senior high school students? If so,what aspects will be improved?In order to explore answers to these questions,this research adopts quantitative and qualitative research methods.The study is divided into three stages: Above all,the students in two parallel classes are given a pretest of reading ability and a questionnaire research about reading motivation.The result shows that there is no obvious difference in reading ability and reading motivation between two classes.In addition,the two parallel classes,with the same teaching schedule,teaching materials and the teacher,apply different teaching methods.For example,EC adopts SSR,while CC are used traditional reading teaching method.Finally,the post-test is administered at the end of nineteen weeks experiment and use SPSS19.0 to analyze whether the students’ English reading motivation and reading ability have been improved.At the same time,questionnaires are distributed to students.In order to further study the effect of SSR on students’ English reading motivation,six students of different levels are randomly selected from EC to conduct interviews.The results of the research are as follows:(1)SSR stimulates their reading motivation and cultivates their good reading habits and strategies.(2)SSR can improve their reading comprehension ability and various reading skills,especially summarizing the main idea,guessing the meaning of the word and inferring the intention of the text.It is an effective way to broaden their extracurricular reading.This paper also lists the limitations of the research and gives suggestions for future related research,the research subjects should be more diverse,the measurement of English reading ability can be more comprehensive,and the experimental period should be longer.Combined with the results of this experiment,teachers can apply SSR into daily reading teaching process,and adopt a“student-oriented”teaching method.Besides,teachers also should broaden students’ English learning approaches properly,and update students’ learning methods.