Using Young Adult Literature To Improve Chinese Senior High Students' English Reading Autonomy

An important part of quality-oriented education is to train the students' autonomous learning ability. Developing students' autonomous reading will promote students'autonomous learning ability; in this way, autonomous reading is an important part of English learning in senior high English teaching. There are many ways to improve the students'reading autonomy, and the most important step is to select the right reading materials. If the reading materials are interesting, they will attract the students naturally because the literary charms and rich hot topics will attract the young adults greatly. Young adult literature (YAL) can be one of the best bridging reading materials to cultivate the students' reading autonomy. YAL plays an important role in the teaching and growing of the young adults in the western countries. During her own research, the authoress found that Chinese senior high students lack literature reading experience and consequently their level and quality of reading are very poor. They seldom read the original English books and many of them don't know Young Adult Literature. Because of this, the authoress believes that it is necessary to introduce Young Adult Literature into China's English classrooms.The theoretical bases of autonomous reading are humanism, meta-cognition and constructivism; the theoretical basis of YAL is reader response theory, all of which emphasize the learner-centered training of skills and abilities in English teaching. In this thesis, the authoress first introduced the young adult literature (YAL), and then discussed the trait and merit of the YAL. She showed people the principles for YAL material selection so that the reading materials would be age and psychologically appropriate. She expounded the necessity of cultivating the autonomous ability and the theoretical basis of autonomous reading, putting forward using YAL to improve the students'autonomous reading ability. She displayed the model of the autonomous learning and introduced many methods for autonomous reading training. The application of these methods greatly improved students' meta-cognitive awareness and built up their reading autonomy. In the experiment, the students set their own goals and monitored their own reading processes. They could read on their own more easily and achieved better results in reading proficiency. The reading cycle always started with the individual reading and then moved on to group reading sharing so that both reader as an individual and readers as a group would be trained in reading autonomy. That is reader----text---readers model. The authoress always paid attention to the responses of the students to the text and tested whether they improved their reading interest and proficiency.The experiment applied both quantitative and qualitative researches. The quantitative research includes pre and post standard tests on students reading proficiency; the qualitative research mainly includes questionnaires, and interviews. The data collected from questionnaires, pre and posttest was analyzed by software SPSS12.0. The subjects were 80 senior high school students in Hai Dian Experimental Middle School, HaiDian District, Beijing. The authoress did this research in Class 5 and Class 6 of Grade 2. Class 5 was the experimental class and Class 6 was the control class. During the experiment, the authoress first trained students on the awareness of autonomous reading. Then she used the eight pieces of YAL reading materials to train students on basic reading skills such as skimming, scanning, associating, and predicting. Each week, she gave students a piece to read and checked whether they had been attracted by this material and responded more actively to the reading and thus became more autonomous in reading acts. After four months' experiment, the authoress collected the post questionnaire and proficiency test data.By comparing the results of reading proficiency tests and the data of the questionnaires plus the records of the interview, the authoress concluded that YAL reading material has many benefits in promoting students' reading autonomy. Although the experiment had improved both individual reading autonomy and group reading autonomy, there were limitations. Time was limited and the teaching methods were insufficient to cater for all the students' needs; therefore, the results of the experiment still have much room for improvement.