Enhancing Reading Skills Through Classroom Teaching In The High School: A Case Study

The aim of reading teaching stated in the new English Curriculum Standard for the high school is "to understand information, enrich knowledge, appreciate and enjoy reading, cultivate and enhance reading skills, and learn the language knowledge in the text." Therefore, teaching reading in high school is not only limited to teaching new words and grammar, but also to enhance reading skills, which are required by the English Curriculum Standard with specific levels. Thus, how to cultivate reading skills of high school students becomes a major issue. However, among many researches on high school reading skills training, few of them study on how to cultivate specific reading skills in classroom teaching in detail. Therefore, with the purpose of providing a new way for English teachers who want to enhance students' reading skills, this thesis studies how to cultivate the reading skills through analyzing the instructional designs and interprets it from teachers' point of view.The subject of this case study is a high school teacher who has 15 years teaching experience from Zhejiang province. He has developed his own views on reading skills teaching. Instruments, such as interview, analysis of the instructional designs, and classroom observation are adopted to have a profound study of the subject's teaching methods in enhancing students' reading skills and the reason of his success. Meanwhile, the subject's awareness of the cultivating and enhancing reading skills will be examined in order to conduct a better analysis of the two main questions above.The collected data shows that the subject has a strong awareness in enhancing reading skills and it is a kind of gradually developing awareness. Besides, based on the interview and instructional designs, how to cultivate reading skills from the macroscopical and microscopical ways are analyzed. The former one means cultivating different reading skills according to different kinds of reading. The later one means cultivating specific reading skills, including the subject's characteristic skill of "key words" and the skill of "using the conjunctions to understanding the logical relations within sentences".Based on these analyses, the properties of the subject's cultivating and enhancing reading skills in classroom teaching are having an in-depth reading of the text, focusing on the logic within the text, and following the basic principles of instructional design. Finally, two reasons accounting for why the subject can successfully enhance reading skills are found out based on analyzing the developing awareness of cultivating and enhancing reading skills and two ways of reading skills training from interview and instructional designs. Firstly, the internal reason is that the subject has strong abilities in text analysis, logical thinking and instructional design which are developed from his strong awareness of cultivating and enhancing reading skills, the theory learning and long teaching practice. Secondly, the fine learning community formed after his study for the Master of Education might be regarded as an external reason. These two reasons compensate each other and promote the enhancing of reading skills.Finally, two aspects of implications for enhancing reading skills are discussed based on this research. Teachers who want to enhance student's reading skills had better make efforts to learn theories about reading skills, pay attention to text analysis and logic relations, and adhere to enhancing reading skills. On the other hand, the teacher development programmer might provide more chances for teachers to study in colleges so as to create a kind of fine learning environment.