On Cultivating Students'ability Of Autonomous Reading In Senior Middle School English Teaching

"Optimizing ways of learning and cultivating students'ability of autonomous learning" is one of the basic concepts of the new English Curriculum Standards for Senior Middle Schools issued by the Ministry of Education in 2003. Learner autonomy has been hotly discussed within the field of applied linguistics since the 1980's. A large number of books and articles have been published on its concepts, background, rationales, development and the practice in promoting autonomy in varieties of contexts. Among the researches on learner autonomy, researchers lay emphasis on the second or foreign language learning as a whole, but few talk about it with specific reference to reading.Reading is one of the four essential skills in learning English and the most important ways of getting information, so reading teaching is the core of English teaching. However, the traditional model of reading teaching emphasizes teachers'dominant roles, neglecting students'important roles. Most students are in the position of passively receiving knowledge. So the traditional reading teaching is"spending more time with lower efficiency". Although there has been much research on English reading teaching and learning, most researchers make the research from the perspective of teachers and reading strategies, neglecting the main body of reading—students. Students'effort is the main cause to improve their reading competence, so cultivating students'learner autonomy in reading is an effective way to improve learners' reading competence and the efficiency of reading teaching.The author puts forward"autonomous reading"based on learner autonomy. No accurate definitions of autonomous reading have yet been given at present. In this thesis, the author thinks autonomous reading means guided by the teacher, students can set their goals, make reading plans by themselves, select the English materials that they are interested in and employ the reading strategies correctly while reading to get the information they need and achieve the goal they have set. They are able to monitor their reading process when reading independently and assess the reading outcome.The purpose of this study is to investigate the present situation of autonomous reading in senior middle schools and examine the effect of AR training so as to find out effective ways to cultivate students'ability of autonomous reading. Specifically, the author intends to explore the following questions: 1) What's the present situation of AR in senior middle schools? 2) Can AR training boost students'motivation and enhance their interest in reading ? 3)How to improve students'ability of AR and English language proficiency through AR training? The participants were 100 senior grade one students at No.1 Middle School of Qingzhou. Questionnaire, interview, pretest and posttest were used in the experiment. Data collected from the questionnaire, pretest and posttest were analyzed by SPSS11.0.The study has the following findings: In general, the present situation of AR in senior middle schools is far from satisfactory and students' ability of AR is still at a low level. The results from the questionnaire and interview have both revealed that after AR training, students'motivation in reading has been boosted and interest has been raised. Through AR training, students'ability of AR has been enhanced. The data from the posttest indicates students in the experimental group have made greater progress in reading comprehension and English language proficiency than those in the control group. We can conclude that AR can improve students'English reading competence and English language proficiency.The findings of the present research have some implications for English teaching and learning in senior middle schools: Teachers and learners should change their roles; Teachers should recommend suitable AR materials for students , increase time for AR and set environment for AR. Suggestions on ways of cultivating students'ability of AR are also put forward,such as boosting students'motivation and increasing students'interest in reading, guiding students to set up goals and make plans by themselves, training reading strategies and vocabulary techniques, developing students' ability of monitoring AR in and after class, developing students' ability of making assessments in various ways and using cooperative reading to cultivate students'ability of AR.It is hoped that this study can make contributions to English reading teaching in senior middle schools and the future research in autonomous reading.