| As reading is one of the four basic elements of English ability, how to improve students' reading comprehension ability has been attracting a lot of researchers' attention. However, the main models of English reading now are focused on the understanding of only either the linguistic knowledge or the contextual knowledge. None of them is perfect after being carried out.The adaptation theory was proposed by the Belgium linguist Verschueren in 1999. It holds that using language must consist of the continuous making of linguistic choices, consciously or unconsciously, for language-internal (i.e. structural) and/or language-external reasons. These choices can be situated at any level of linguistic form: phonetic/phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and semantic. The meaningful functioning of language is a dynamic process operating on context-structure relationships at various levels of salience.The reading process is a process of making choices, in the sense that the writer chooses how to use the language to express his idea and while reading, the readers choose how to understand the text. Reading comprehension is an interaction between linguistic knowledge and contextual knowledge. Both are essential factors in the reading process. In practical reading, all these elements are involved in interaction; the dynamic adaptation among them enables reading to be a dynamic, complete unified whole.This thesis proposes a new model of English reading based on the adaptation theory, aiming to improve the learners' reading comprehension ability. This model holds that in the English reading classes, the students should adapt at the language structural and contextual level of the text dynamically guided by the teacher and based on the existing schema in their minds. In order to testify the feasibility and efficiency of this model, a study is carried out. Totally 139 students of Senoir Two from four natural classes in No. 1 Middle School of Xin Hua (Class One, Class Two) and No. 16 Middle School of Tao Jiang (Class Three and Class Four) are chosen intentionally as the participants of this study. Class One and Class Two have the same English teacher and Class Three and Class Four also have the same one. An interview with the two English teachers of these classes is carried out before the study to investigate the students' reading situation. Results of the interview show that there are three major problems in students' reading: 1) though they know the meaning of most words in a text, they still can't understand it thoroughly; 2) they are afraid of meeting new words and long sentences while reading, which will make them feel confused and don't want to continue to read; 3) it's difficult for them to find out the writer's intention of writing or the purpose of a certain paragraph. So we can infer that the students can't understand the text from the contextual perspective and they also have difficulty in analyzing the language structure of the text. Thus the author proposes that in English reading class, the teacher should guide the students to understand the text at language structural and contextual level. The author chooses Class One and Class Three to be experimental classes, in which the adaptation based model of English reading is trained. Class Two and Class Four are control classes, in which the traditional model of English reading is trained. The study lasts for a whole semester. Another interview is held after the experiment to investigate the changes of students' attitudes towards English reading. Students whose student's numbers are 3, 13, 23 are chosen to take part in the interview. The interview shows that after a semester's experiment, students in the experimental classes are more interested in English reading than before and they think their English reading comprehension ability have been improved a lot; while the students in the control classes are still not very interested in English reading and they don't think there are much improvements on their English reading comprehension ability. The quantitative data drawn form the pre-test and post-test of English reading comprehension ability are processed with SPSS 16.0. The results show that there are great differences in the scores of experimental classes between pre-test and post-test, and the reading comprehension ability of students in these classes has been improved a lot, while there are few differences in that of the control classes. This indicates that using the adaptation based model of English reading is of great help for students to understand the text precisely, thus improving their reading comprehension ability.Due to the confines of experimental conditions, this study has some limitations, such as, the sample size is relatively small, the experimental time is relatively short, and so on. Nevertheless, the author still thinks that this study is of certain theoretical and practical significance for it provides the enlightenment for English reading.
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