An Experimental Study On Graded Teaching Mode In Higher Vocational College English Reading

Reading is an effective way to obtain knowledge and acquire profound information. At the same time, reading is the basis to improve the ability of reading listening, speaking, writing and translation. For the Higher Vocational College students in China, after they graduate from their college, they will step into job market. Since they are often required to read and translate some English materials that are closely relevant to their work, for example English newspapers and magazines, original books, the scientific materials, the introductions of the productions, the imported or exported trading principles, the manual of the imported equipment, etc., they often apply reading and translation skills to their jobs. However, the English reading ability of Higher Vocational College students is far from the expectations. According to the author’s investigation, there are considerable gaps on English reading ability between the students in the same class. In the collective educational environment, there are usually too many students in one class. In terms of this situation, teachers usually set the same learning goals and arrange the same class tasks for students of different learning levels when they design lesson. The result is that the students of higher levels of reading ability find it boring and unchallenging to do reading exercises; while the students of lower level of reading ability think it hard for them to finish the tasks which would discourage them at last. Thus, it will lead to an inefficient English reading class.For the sake of improving the students’ interest and ability in English reading, the author applied Graded Teaching Mode in one class of 50 students in Hebei Women’s Vocational College. The experiment is to testify whether Graded Teaching Mode can help enhance students’ interest in reading, and whether Graded Teaching Mode can help improve English reading ability of students at different levels. The design of the research is according to Wang Juan’s framework of Graded Teaching Mode which has five aspects of grading, i.e. Students gradation, aim gradation teaching gradation, homework gradation and evaluation gradation. At the beginning ofthe research, two first college year parallel classes were chosen respectively as the experimental class and the control class. In the experimental class, the author grouped the students of different learning levels into several heterogeneous groups according to their scores they have got in the questionnaire and the pre-test. And every group consisted of five students of three different learning levels: Level A, Level B and Level C, namely elementary group, intermediate group and advanced group. After the gradation, the author respectively designed different learning goals, class activities, reading tasks, reading homework, and evaluations which were fitted to different students. This experiment lasted one term. Four months later, the author made a comparison between the results of the students in the experimental class and the control class before and after the experiment. The analysis and discussion of the results revealed that there was significant difference between these two classes before and after the experiment. And it proved that Graded Teaching Mode is of great benefit to the improvement of the students’ interest and ability in English reading.