Application Of Situational Approach To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

It is very important to teach reading in senior high school. However, the results of reading teaching are notso satisfactory at present. In reading classes, teachers play an emphasis on language knowledge, and situationcreation is overlooked. As a result, gradually students lose interest in reading classes, which hinders students’reading comprehension development. How to improve teaching efficiency is a difficult problem for teachers tosolve. From linguistic, pedagogy and psychology points of view, under the guidance of Input Theory,Constructivist Learning Theory and the Mood Psychology Theory, the author suggests that Situational Approachcan be applied to English reading teaching in senior high school.Situational Approach refers to the way which teachers create concrete situations that are emotional andlively according to the teaching objective in the process of teaching. It combines concrete situations andlanguage presentation to form images in the brain, and can inspire students to form certain experiences, helpstudents understand and obtain knowledge and skills and develop student’s psychological function to improvetheir reading comprehension.The present study adopted both qualitative and quantitative research methods in a one-term long teachingexperiment. The instruments used in the experiment were NSEFC, Student’s Book8, a questionnaire and tests.The questionnaire was made by revising and complementing the questionnaires used by Long Wenzhen (2003)and Qian Zhaoxia (2011). The tests were all adapted from2012NMET test papers, and it has some reliability.The subjects of the study were142students randomly selected from two intact classes the author taught. Class12was chosen randomly to serve as the Experimental class where Situational Approach was adopted and class13as the control class where the traditional teaching method was used. At the end of the term, by analyzing thedata of the questionnaires and the scores of pre-test and post-test by SPSS13.0,(p=.000<.05), the author drewthe conclusion that the application of Situational Approach to English reading teaching in senior high school canincrease students’ interest in reading and improve their reading comprehension.The thesis consists of six parts. Chapter One is the introduction to the thesis, which briefly discusses theimportance of reading comprehension, the background and significance of the present study. Chapter Two is aliterature review that briefly introduces major reading teaching models, the research on Situational Approach athome and abroad as well as related studies on Situational Approach to reading. Chapter Three mainly discussesthe theories contributing to the thesis, that is Input Hypotheses, Constructivist Learning theory and the MoodPsychology theory. Chapter Four describes the methodology and provides some information concerning the design of the research questions, subjects of the experiment, experimental instruments, procedures of theexperiment and data collection and analysis. Chapter Six is about the pedagogical implications and limitations ofthe present study.Altogether, Situational Approach can foster students to study English from passive attitude to active attitude.It creates a good interaction between teachers and students. A series of scenes can make the contents of readingtexts changed from abstract to specific. It can improve students’ English reading comprehension as well asincrease learning interest. It has good effect on reading teaching.