The Application Of Context Theory To The Reading Teaching Of High School

Reading is regarded as the most important skills in the five essential English skills. The Ministry of Education of our country also makes a specific regulation in the New Curriculum that the improvement of students'reading ability is the most important goals for a long run. However, there is still a big gap between the present situation of reading of the high school students and the regulation as well as goals of our country. The reason is mainly because that in reading class, teachers still adopt traditional reading teaching methods, that is, highly emphasizes on the teaching of vocabulary and grammar, ignores the analysis of the structure of the whole text and its context, which make the students not understand the meaning of a text in a deeper sense and as a result, their reading ability can not be improved significantly either.The British anthropologist Malinowski (1923) firstly puts forward the concept of"context". He thinks that utterance and environment are integrated with each other closely, thus language environment is necessary for the understanding of language. The context theory is inherited and developed by many scholars after Malinowski; they do a lot of researches about the application of context on the English reading teaching as well. The studies prove that, by cultivating the contextual awareness of students, they can deepen their understanding about reading text. In the process of reading, context can help them fix on the exact meaning of a word, predict the coming content and can enrich their background and cultural knowledge, so as to improve their reading ability to a large extent.In order to prove whether the context theory is helpful in improving the reading ability of high school students, the author of this thesis makes a study which is about applying context-based teaching method for improving the reading ability of high school students in Mishan No.1 Middle School. By doing the pretest, the author proves that before the experiment, the reading ability of the two classes is roughly at the same level. Then during the later four-month experiment, the author took two teaching method in reading class, which respectively are the traditional teaching reading method and context-based teaching reading method, and have a posttest and an interview at the end of term. According to the experimental statistics, the students'test scores of the experimental class which are trained contextual awareness are obviously higher than the students of controlled class. What's more, the author also find that in answering some specific types of questions such as inference and vocabulary questions, the performance of the students of the experimental class is better than the students of controlled class. Therefore, this thesis gets such a conclusion: In the process of reading, context theory is definitely an efficient reading strategy. Moreover, using context theory can answer vocabulary and inference questions better.