Integrating Simplified Literature Reading Into High School English Course

Reading is an essential skill for learners of English as a foreign language. Literature is an art form dependent on a specific medium-language and is a rich and widely appeal source of material for reading. Literature texts provide examples of language resources. It is well known that a piece of literature will certainly increase students' interest in reading. In quality-oriented education, literature is set as one of the major learning tasks of foreign language teaching. The latest English Curriculum Standards stipulates literary appreciation as an optional course. There are also learner standards about language skills describing students with 8^th level should read some simple literature reading with the help of teachers, and those with 9^th level should read common literature works, know about the main characters and get a main idea about the reading.Based on these requirements, the thesis aims to find out whether simplified literature reading has a positive effect on students' language proficiency in high school. In order to check the effect of this practice, the author conducts a comparative study of students in senior 2 between experimental class and control class. Descriptive and experimental study and quantitative and qualitative analysis are applied to the experiment. In the process of the study, two questionnaires are designed to investigate reading status of both students and teachers in the high school English classroom; an 8-month experiment on the teaching of simplified literature reading which is carried out to explore whether there is a positive effect on students' language proficiency. The results show that integrating simplified literature reading into English classroom of high school contributes much to students' language skills, cultural awareness and motivate students' reading interests. The study brings some major findings: literature reading improves students' listening, reading and writing competence; it facilitates students' positive attitudes and interests in reading and helps to develop students' cross-cultural awareness. In addition, the thesis discusses the limitations of the study and proposes some suggestions for further research.