The Application Of Inquiry Reading In Rural Senior High School English Teaching

In the twenty-first century when inquiry learning has become an overwhelming learning approach, China is witnessing a reformation in both teaching and learning approach. The standard which was established and issued in July, 2001 by National Ministry of Education indicates that the educators should"attempt inquiry reading through various channels such as library and the Internet", and"train students'ability of exploratory reading and creative reading". Nowadays, educators and policymakers have paid much attention to this scientific learning approach—inquiry learning. And many articles have been published on this subject, many of which are about inquiry learning in math, physics, or chemises. However, inquiry learning in English reading comprehension in China is still a new attempt, and the problem how to improve reading comprehension of the rural senior high school students almost remains unexplored, and the research on its theory and practice is still at the beginning.Therefore, a thorough investigation and research is called on urgently. This research paper tries to answer the question that whether inquiry learning can be better than traditional teaching in improving rural high school students'reading comprehension by empirical research method.This research paper comprises six parts, beginning with an introduction, including the current situation of inquiry learning, problems existing in inquiry learning and the significances of the research.Part two, named as"literature review of inquiry learning", consists several definitions that are of variety but consistency in nature. Inquiry learning is the foundation element of constructivist learning theory developed by cognitive psychologists. Magazine Information Power states that"the information search process mirrors this description of the learning process: students actively seek to construct meaning from the sources they encounter and to create products that shape and communicate that meaning effectively". Inquiry is an investigative process that engages students in answering questions, solving real world problems, confronting issues, or exploring personal interests with meaningful cognition. So cognitive theory and meaningful learning are also related to the present research. To carry out the life-long education theory and subjectivity education theory also need to further make the research of inquiry learning. Those theories together offer a great help to the research of the application of inquiry reading in rural senior high school English teaching. Besides, the characteristics of inquiry learning and teacher and student roles in it are the important part.Part three, named as"research design of inquiry reading", deals with the hypothesis that by inquiry learning, students can improve their reading comprehension. Students recall from their memories, ask questions, choose the topic they are interested in, track down materials related to the topic with motivation, work in groups at the same topic, discuss when necessary, and then share their findings in the class. During the course of inquiry reading, students are imposed to sufficient comprehendible language input, and their affection filter is relatively low, because what they choose to do is totally out of their real interest. While inquiry reading students have to work on words'meaning, scan and skim, skip whenever necessary, and have to apply their reading strategy, speed reading to get valuable information in limited time. The experiment that is conducted to testify the hypothesis goes on the 118 participants who fall into two natural classes according to the English scores they got in the entrance examination: the control group and the experimental group. The traditional teaching approach is used to teach the control group extensive reading while the experiment group is inspired to do inquiry reading after they know how to apply reading strategy, which the teacher shows in class as she does in the control class. The scores the students in the experimental class get in the reading test are compared with that the participants get in the control group after 24 working weeks, using t-value and mean to testify the scores in the two classed. At the same time, the test methods such as classroom observation, questionnaire, interview and experimental method are use together to collect the data.Part four contains the results and analysis on the results. From the data collected, it describes the present reading comprehension state of rural senior high school first-year students by tests, classroom observation, questionnaire and interview, and then analyzes the elements that cause rural senior high school students to feel poor in reading comprehension through the prospects of vocabulary, reading strategy, reading habit and reading speed. Meanwhile, it makes an analysis on the results by analyzing the data collected from the experiment. From the comparison between scores that the participants got in the experimental class in the test and scores that the participants got in the control group in the same test. The t-value in the post 3.643, P=0.000<0.05 means that inquiry learning is superior to traditional teaching approach in improving the reading comprehension of rural senior high school students.The fifth part is a case study, which is utilized to display how the procedure of the inquiry reading research design in a lesson of a real classroom, thus to present the teaching procedure and strategies in inquiry reading.After part five comes the conclusion, including discussion of findings, limitations of the research and the future research.