A Survey And Analysis On Present Situation Of Extracurricular Reading Of Rural Junior School Students

There is little doubt that a great deal of English reading contributes to the improvement of English language competence, which has been proved by most language experts and scholars. The New Junior English Curriculum Standard has set specific demands on the amount of extracurricular reading for different grades, namely totally 40,000 words for Level 3,10,000 words for Level 4 and 15,000 words for Level 5. Obviously, the new curriculum has a higher demand on extracurricular reading for junior students. However, the new curriculum does not give any particular suggestions on how to meet the demand. Thus, extracurricular reading for junior students, especially rural students has not attracted much of people's attention. This thesis reiterates the necessity and importance of extracurricular reading. It aims to find out the present situation of extracurricular reading of rural junior students, to analyze the cause of the problems and to discuss ways to change the current situation. To fulfill this, a survey on extracurricular reading has been conducted among 120 students from different grades and 10 English teachers of a rural school.The results of the study show that the current situation of rural junior students is not optimistic. Many students are not quite interested in extracurricular reading and are unwilling to spend much time on it. The writer speculates that the lack of the teacher's guidance is the main cause of the problem.Based on the findings and some other researches, the writer thinks the key to improving extracurricular reading is that teachers should play a more active role in guiding. Therefore, suggestions on how to conduct extracurricular reading activities are proposed in the last part of the thesis.