Research On The Effect Of "The Interactive Reading Model" On The Senior Middle School Students Of The Rural Area Of China

With the development of the English teaching and research, reading has been regarded as one of the most important language skills in English acquisition. Reading can help the students master the language, acquire information and improve their communicative ability. So it is an active and effective way for the students to cognize the objective world.In the process of the English teaching reform, how to improve reading comprehension has drawn more and more attention from both students and teachers. But, under the influence of the traditional "grammar-translation" pedagogy, a good many senior high school teachers still adopt the "bottom-up" model in their teaching of reading, that is, teaching from new words to key sentence patterns and then to paragraphs and finally to the whole article. Thus they ignore the development of students' capability of applying the language to daily life. This kind of reading model overstresses the details of English vocabulary and grammar, but overlooks the importance of understanding the logical organization of a passage, ignores the particular way the author expresses his central idea and neglects the cultivation of students' capability of analysis. It thus inhibits the improvement of the students' reading ability.However, the "top-down" model, which developed quickly in the 1970s and has been adopted by quite a lot of middle schools teachers, overcorrects those limitations. It pays high attention to the whole passage, its structure and main idea, and the relationships in-between, but neglects details of the language. Therefore even if many students can speak English fluently and read very fast, they can't, on the other hand, grasp the writer's intention, know the exact meaning of certain words, phrases or complicated sentences, thus misunderstanding resulted.In the light of my own experience working as a senior high school English teacher, and under the guidance of the achievements made by experienced educationalists, I analyze carefully the advantages and disadvantages of both "bottom-up" and "top-down" models, and then bring out the necessity of adopting the "interactive model" to reform our English teaching.In order to prove that the "interactive model" is the best one at present that suits high school students in their work, I, collaborating with some colleagues, kept working on an experiment for over one year, which involved two classes of students. The students in one class (the controlled group) were given English lessons on the "interactive model" while the students in the other class (the reference group) learned to read in a traditional way. The result shows that the interactive reading model, based of the schemata theory, is the most efficient reading model. The experiment proves that the application of this model to senior high school English teaching is not only important but also indispensable.