A Study Of The Cultivation Of Senior High School Students’ Story Reading Ability

Teaching reading is one of the focuses in senior high schools, for it is the mainway of input. Generally speaking, the reading materials are either text books whichmostly include expositive essays or ones intended for standard tests. Intensive readingis the main teaching strategy in the procedure of teaching text books. However, theresult of this type of teaching is not satisfactory, because it cannot meet students’needs for interest nor can it offer them sufficient input to improve their readingcompetence.Students’reading ability is expected to be improved by the curriculum standardfor the senior high school and college English tests. How to cultivate the students’reading ability, improve their motivation and polish their reading strategies haveattracted the attention of many English teachers.In order to solve the problems, an experiment was conducted based on the InputHypothesis by Krashen to find a proper teaching pedagogy, where English storieswere the materials for teaching reading in order to add supplements to the traditionalteaching reading.To prove that this story-based reading approach is practical, effective, andfeasible in bettering students reading ability, an experiment with two classes inXuzhou No.1Middle School was carried out for a semester. In one experimentalclass, the new approach was tried in comparison with one controlled class, wheretraditional way of teaching remained in an attempt to illustrate that the new approachreally worked well as expected. Some apparent progress in motivation, readingstrategies and academic achievements were made by those who were exposed to thenew learning environment. The findings tell us that using English stories as readingmaterials for senior high school students is much rewarding in improving teachingwork, more importantly, reading and learning efficiency.