On The Application Of Project-based Learning To English Newspaper Teaching In Middle School

In the age of information, reading ability is becoming increasingly important, which leadsto the stress on reading skill in English teaching. Full-time Compulsory Education EnglishCurriculum Standards for General High School (trial version) points out that in addition tothe textbook, the students in Grade Seven should reach a total volume of more than 40,000words in extracurricular reading, in Grade Eight, over 100,000 words, and the volume ofextra-curricular reading should be a total of more than 150,000 words when Grade Ninestudents complete their studies. The Standards also pays great attention to the exploitation ofcurriculum resources. It requires that the teachers should develop and make use of othercurriculum resources actively in order to make the students contact and learn English from asmany different channels and in as many different forms as possible. Because of this, manymiddle schools choose English newspapers as students’reading material, which expose thestudents to an enormous amount of latest information covering politics, economy, science,culture, education, sports, entertainment and other aspects of social life. They are excellentfor reading. However, the traditional teacher-centered teaching depresses students’enthusiasm of reading newspapers, and the learning outcome is not satisfying. Therefore newteaching approaches are called for in English newspaper teaching in middle school tostimulate the students’interest in reading English newspapers and improve their readingabilities.Project-based Learning is a learner-centered approach. Since the 1990s, it has been afocus in the research of English teaching. Many researchers abroad have done considerableamount of work on its definition, characteristics, theoretical basis as well as its application.These researches have shown that PBL is effective in stimulating students’motivation andfostering higher order thinking skills as well as in helping students to gain deeperunderstandings and valuable knowledge. However, the study of PBL in English teaching is arelatively new field in China. Not until a few years ago did PBL begin to be applied inEnglish teaching in universities to improve the students’speaking and listening skills.This study tries applying PBL to English newspaper teaching in middle school in order to stimulate students’motivation and interest in reading English newspapers, enhance theirlearning autonomy, and improve their reading comprehension and language proficiency. Theparticipants were 60 Grade Seven students at Jinan Foreign Language School who takeEnglish newspaper reading class as an elective. This study on the effectiveness of theapplication of PBL to English newspaper teaching was done by means of questionnaire,individual interviews and experiment. Data collected from pre and posttests was analyzed byusing the statistical treatment software SPSS Statistics 17.0.The results of the study indicate that the students have been greatly motivated to readEnglish newspapers by PBL. They improve their reading skills and learning autonomy, andgradually have cultural awareness. The students in the experimental group have made greaterprogress in reading comprehension and language proficiency than those in the control group.However, there still exist some problems in the application of PBL. Therefore more effortsand long-term commitment of both teachers and students should be made for the successfuladoption of PBL in English newspaper teaching in middle school.The findings of the current study have some implications for English newspaper teachingin middle school: the teachers should be more patient and provide more detailed guidance tothe students and encourage them to persist when they encounter difficulties in the projectwork to develop their abilities; in this application, the teachers’work is much more complexand challenging, so they need to keep learning and improve their synthetic quality. Somesuggestions are also provided for further research: at the beginning of the application of PBLteachers should give the students sufficient time and guidance on their learning, help themdesign their projects and search for more information, and make sure that all of them haveopportunities to participate in the project work; reading strategies should be adopted in theprocess of PBL; a more comprehensive evaluation system should be established.It is hoped that this study can be conducive to the improvement of English newspaperteaching in middle school and will shed light on the future research in PBL and Englishnewspaper teaching.