Tailoring "Literature Circles" To EFL High School Learners' Extensive Reading

Reading extensively plays a pivotal role in successful language learning and boasts tremendous benefits. However, its present situation in EFL high schools is far from satisfactory in terms of quantity, quality and effectiveness. This thesis reports an experiment with a novel approach to extensive reading: Literature Circles, which was outlined by Harvey Daniels in his 1994 book. The study was inspired and motivated by the idea of importing the novel innovation to make extensive reading a meaningful and fruitful experience for high school EFL learners in Shanghai. Through a qualitative research, the author tailors the original model of literature circles to the EFL high school context and renames it―Tailored Literature Circles‖. The study focuses on how workable the structure of Tailored Literature Circles is and what factors affect its effectiveness.The study investigated the responses of 72 EFL high school learners from two classes toward their 7-month experience with Tailored Literature Circles, which went through four successive stages: (1) Student background questionnaire; (2) Reading scheme design in the framework of Tailored Literature Circles; (3) Tailored Literature Circles for newspaper reading; (4) Tailored Literature Circles for graded readers. The analysis of the survey results and the case studies proved the workability of the structure and indicated that a variety of factors rather than a single one were exercising an influence on the effectiveness of Tailored Literature Circles. Some pedagogical implications and limitations were also discussed.