The Effect Of The Autonomous Reading With Portfolios On Junior Middle School Students' Vocabulary

Language barriers are caused by difficulties in understanding the language and the ability to express the language. In terms of the reading barriers, the obstacles may arise from vocabulary, grammar and text structure. Among various reading barriers, vocabulary obstacle should be prioritized. As Brown (1994) points out, the best internalization of vocabulary comes from encounters with words within the context of surrounding discourse.According to some studies,'accumulating vocabulary through reading' is regarded as a reliable and scientific way to enlarge vocabulary. But what to read, how to read it and why to read it are still relatively puzzling both teachers and students. In addition, the English classroom teaching of Junior High Schools in Shanghai is confronted with limited time, tight schedule, heavy workload and high expectation. Therefore, it is hard for students to enlarge vocabulary just through the time spent in classroom, or through intensive practicing and teaching. It is the same case with reading comprehension ability cultivation, because, more often than not, one may acquire the methodology in class,and develop real skills through after-class readings. Up to now, the existing studies have been mainly focused on the simplifying practice and standardized training method. The initiative of students is almost ignored, not along their flexibility to apply the knowledge in other disciplines or subjects. Therefore, this research is going to take the vocabulary enlargement as a breakthrough with the combination of autonomous reading and efficient portfolio management so as to help students enlarge vocabulary and overcome reading obstacles.This research consists of 3 stages. To start with, a survey is conducted in the form of questionnaire and test to get a general overview of the reading ability and vocabulary of junior high school students. Then autonomous reading is introduced to the experimental class, a class of 8th grade students at a school in Shanghai, supplemented by the effective portfolio management. After 12 weeks experiment, a post-test is conducted to both experimental and control class., and another questionnaire is distributed to the experimental class. The data are statistically analyzed by SPSS software. The results of the experiment show that students are able to enlarge vocabulary through autonomous reading and efficient portfolio management.