A Study On The Relevance Between English Literature Experimental Reading Course And The Ability Of Students’ Reading Comprehension

With the reinforcement of the international intercommunion, communication function is strongly emphasized. So in English teaching, literature is gradually fading out of the English teaching. In recent years, some scholars have been aware of this problem and have advocated that literature education must be returned to English education. The English Curriculum Standards (2003) has made specific requirements for literature reading and encourage students to do literature reading so as to make up for the lack of literature works in the textbooks.After researching the David Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory and Experiential Learning Cycling, the author tried to combine it with literature reading. Therefore, a new way for literature reading came into being, which was called Experiential Reading. The author tried to define what this new reading method is and design a teaching model of Experiential Reading for literature reading. In this paper, the Experiential Reading was applied to literature reading practice. In theory, the author found out that Experiential Reading for literature could improve Senior high school students’reading comprehension effectively, especially the ability to catch details, to judge and to infer. In practice, the author designed a teaching experiment to observe the relevance between Experiential Reading of literature and the Senior high school students’reading comprehension. The Reading Comprehension in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) usually examines six kinds of abilities. And in this paper, the author only chose two of the six to be the dependent variables, which were the ability to catch details and the ability to judge and infer. The testing tools of this paper came from The Reading Comprehension of NMET, which only covered the questions that tested the ability to catch details and the ability to judge and infer. The experimental subjects were two junior classes from NingHua No.1Middle School. This teaching experiment lasted for one semester. At last, the data suggested that Experiential Reading of English literature was related to the ability of catch details and the ability of judging and inferring. In other words, the data told us that the reading method, Experiential Reading of English literature, could improve the students’ability of reading comprehension, especially the ability to catch details and the ability to judge and infer.