An Empirical Study On Script-Based Reading Teaching Of English Narration In The Middle School

Reading process is a heat subject in language teaching around the world as the result of being treated as the main mean for people to learn knowledge. Cognitive linguistics believes that people construe what they read or hears as instance or variation from ready-made structure of knowledge or prior experience that can be used to make sense of lexical entities. This research provides an approach to narrative reading instruction, which is based on script theory (Schank & Abelson, 1977). Drawing on the above theory, a scrip-based reading instruction is provided with three steps. Stepl Pre-reading:Students were inspired the scripts occurring in the target passage using flow chart by combining with their prior knowledge of daily experience. Step2 While-reading:teacher helps the students utilize the given scripts to make a reading comprehension and tell the four component of the plot: introduction, rising action, climax and falling action. And then students are asked to retell the story and to give out as many details as possible with the help of the given scripts. Step3 Post-reading:teacher repeats the flow chart of scripts involved in the reading.Aiming at a rational and objective recognition about the influence of script-based reading instruction on reading process, the present study is intended to investigate the output of reading comprehension and the acquisition of reading strategies with different reading instruction by means of two experimental studies with the participation of sixty four Chinese middle school students. The first experiment aims at the output of reading comprehension made up of a pre-test, a post-test and questionnaire about the students' opinion toward the script-based reading instruction. The instrument used in the second experiment to investigate the acquisition of reading strategies is adapted from the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) (Mokhtari and Reicard's,2002) with slight revision to be suitable for the process of narrative reading. Data collected from the SPSS software and questionnaire detecting the subjects' opinion toward script-based reading instruction revealed the following major findings:1) Script-approached reading instruction can facilitate the output of narrative reading comprehension.2) Students believe that the script-based reading instruction is new and informative which can help their understanding of narration during the reading process.3) The script-based reading instruction can improve the acquisition of reading strategies on the combination of all three dimensions (P=0.043< 0.05). Especially for one of dimensions of reading strategies, Global Reading Strategies, the significant difference (P= 0.006<0.05) was found between the experimental and controlled groups.In the light of the experimental results, the script-based reading instruction is an effective method considering the output of reading comprehension and acquisition of reading strategies. The current study also explores the potential applications of script-based instruction to vocabulary learning.The present research represents an attempt to bridge a gap between the theoretical study in cognitive linguistics and the practical application.