An Empirical Study Of Inquiry-based Language Teaching In Junior-middle-school Newspaper Reading Class

Reading has been acknowledged as the most effective way to learn English as a foreign language (EFL), and of supreme importance to EFL learners. Reading comprehension ability becomes one keen aspect to value language ability. As one component of the model of language ability, along with language knowledge, it is more important for the junior middle school students to improve their reading ability. How to improve the reading comprehension ability become the most urgent. So we offer the Newspaper reading class in the junior middle school. It is a new kind of class for the students and the teachers of the junior middle school. In this situation, we use Inquiry-based language Teaching (IBLT) in the Newspaper reading class. After doing the experiment about the application of this method for two years, we prove that Inquiry-based language teaching is an effective method in Junior-middle-school Newspaper reading class. In practical application, some of the English teacher wrongly use the IBLT in the class, the questions designed by the teacher are on the flat that are mechanical practice, imitate. In such situation it is hard for students to master the language. Therefore, how to design the questions is a difficult problem existing in the class for the English teacher. In this paper we focus on whether IBLT is more effective in Newspaper reading class, how teacher design the questions in the Newspaper reading class and how teachers make proper assessment.There are six chapters in this paper. Chapter One makes a brief introduction about background of ESL teaching in China and research questions and the significance of the study. Chapter Two gives a brief description about the history of language teaching and the development of newspaper education. Chapter Three concerns the basic theories about IBLT, including inquiry, inquiry-based learning, and inquiry-based teaching. Chapter Four, the whole teaching process was recorded and analyzed in the experiment. Through the experiment, we try to exam IBLT is more effective in newspaper reading class in Yucai Middle School. Chapter Five answers the questions that were asked in Chapter One. Chapter Six makes a conclusion that it is effective to apply inquiry-based language teaching in junior-middle-school newspaper reading class. Any teaching method has its own advantages and limitations. It is important to balance the theory and practice.