An Application Of Advance Organizer Strategy To Reading Teaching At Senior High School Level

As we know, reading is an important approach to language learning because it is an input process in which a learner gains information to reconstruct his own understanding about the learning contents. Many scholars and English teachers have made some efforts on improving learners’ English reading competence. However, some problems still exist in our present English reading teaching. Owing to the traditional teaching methods and examination-oriented education evaluation system, many teachers focus on the learning of words, phrases and grammar knowledge, paying little attention to the learning of background knowledge and the understanding of the whole passage. Reading class has actually turned out to be vocabulary and grammar teaching class, which is mainly aimed at enlarging vocabulary and consolidating sentence structure. There is no denying that vocabulary and grammar are important, yet, they are definitely not the ultimate aim of reading. The aim of reading should be getting information instead of learning some particular knowledge or skills of a language.First proposed by American psychologist Ausubel in1960, advance organizer refers to the existing background materials with universal meaning in the cognitive structure. It can build up a bridge between what has been known and what to be known. With the help of advance organizers, learners are able to understand more easily the knowledge to be learned. Ausubel believes that the most important factor that affects learning is learner’s original cognitive structure. He emphasizes that learning should be meaningful and receptive. This kind of meaningful reception learning is proceeding via the interaction between the new knowledge and the relevant concepts in learners’ mind, the result of which is the assimilation of the new knowledge and the original knowledge. And the interactive process is actually a cognitive assimilation process. Therefore, he proposed Cognitive Assimilation Theory and Meaningful Learning. He believes only meaningful learning is active and valuable learning. Based on these two theories, he put forward expository teaching, which together with Assimilation Theory and Meaningful Learning, constitutes the theoretical bases of advance organizer strategy.Guided by the above-mentioned theories, the author of this thesis attempts to study the application of advance organizer strategy to English reading class of senior one students in hoping to find out some effective ways of teaching English reading more scientifically and efficiently so as to change students’ attitudes towards English reading and improve their reading competence. Therefore, advance organizer strategy is put to her teaching practice to find answers to the following questions:(1) How can advance organizer strategy change students’attitudes towards English reading?(2) How can advance organizer strategy improve students’ reading skills and strategies?(3) In what way is advance organizer strategy more effective for improving students’reading ability than traditional teaching methods?Based on the above three questions, the author of this thesis has conducted a teaching experiment, which consists of a pre-questionnaire, pre-test, the teaching experiment, a post-questionnaire and post-test.As the results of the experiment show, advance organizer strategy is more effective in promoting the improvement of students’ reading competence than traditional teaching methods. Therefore, a conclusion is drawn that the application of advance organizer strategy in English reading class is feasible and it can improve students’reading competence.