The Application Of CBI In College English Reading Teaching

In recent years, Content-Based Instruction (CBI) has been studied as a new teaching approach at home and abroad. However, there is not much research about CBI in China and the empirical studies for non-English majors in college are still limited up to now. Therefore, an empirical study was conducted on the application of CBI in English reading teaching.The author wanted to prove that CBI can motivate subjects'learning motivation and it is truly effective in improving students'English reading ability by conducting an experiment. The 2-month experiment was carried out in School of Physics and School of Chemistry, Southwest University. The subjects were 85 students from 2 classes, the first-year non-English majors. She used several instruments in this research to make it reliable. A lecture was given to let subjects have a general view of CBI,2 questionnaires an interview were designed to investigate subjects'thoughts and attitudes, and pre-test and post-test were used to see whether the students'reading ability was improved. The results of the study were quite satisfactory. Through analyzing the data from these 2 questionnaires and the collected answers from the interview, most of the students' motivation for learning English reading was found to be greatly enhanced. Besides, subjects'reading ability was improved by comparing the average scores of the 2 sections of the tests and the average total scores as well.For some subjective and objective factors, there might be some limitations of this thesis and they should be improved in the further study.