A Study Of The Applications Of Theme-based CBI In College English Reading Teaching

Reading competence is an essential skill in second language learning. Learnerscan get more information about the language they learn and obtain many vocabularies,sentence structures by themselves through reading process. At the same time, it alsocan facilities the development of other language skills, such as listening, speaking,writing and translating. The researchers about reading teaching are conducted formany years. Nowadays, as a new approach for English teaching, CBI is becomingmore and more welcomed and theme-based CBI model is more suitable for collegeEnglish teaching in China. However, there are few empirical studies about applyingCBI in college students’ reading teaching.This paper explores the two questions: whether theme-based CBI model canimprove college students’ English reading performance; whether students can bemotivated by applying theme-based CBI model in English reading class. The study iscarried out in Shenyang Normal University, and the subjects are65freshmen. Oneclass has33students whose major is physics and another class has32students whosemajor is math. The teacher only teaches the former class under the theme-based CBImodel. And another class is control class. On the whole study, two tests and twoquestionnaires are completed by all students. In order to get a more scientific result,the data which are collected from the tests and questionnaire are analyzed by SPSS forIndependent Sample T-tests and Paired Sample T-tests. After analyzing the results ofIndependent Sample T-tests and Paired Sample T-tests for two tests and questionnaires, it turns out that students in experiment class do better in both aspects than the studentsin control class. They make greater progress than before in English readingperformance. And they are motivated by theme-based CBI model.