A Study On The Application Of English Newspaper To Reading Teaching In Junior Middle Schools

It is well acknowledged that English reading, as the most important receptive skill, plays a dominate role in language learning and teaching in junior middle schools, which is the main way to obtain information. Therefore, it is of significance to cultivate junior students’ reading ability in foreign language teaching. In recent years, The New English Curriculum pointed out that junior students are required to have higher reading proficiency and to read a large amount of reading materials than before. However, English reading teaching mainly centered on the textbook with less information, tedious teaching contents, leading to junior students’ less amount of reading, low reading proficiency, and lack of reading interests. The New English Curriculum clearly stated that English teachers should actively explore various and abundant teaching resources such as audio-media, newspapers and magazines and the internet to enrich the way of learning and teaching English reading.21st century teens, as the most valuable reading material, has much authentic and up-dated information, various themes, innovative design, which will extend teaching contents, easily stimulate students’ reading interests and effectively enhance students’ reading proficiency. As a result, this present thesis aims to explore how to apply newspaper into English reading teaching in junior middle schools and to verify whether the application of English newspaper to reading teaching can increase students’ interests and reading ability by empirical study.Based on the related studies about reading and theories of Krashen’ Input Hypothesis and Affective Filter and scheme theory, this experiment was carried out in two eight grade parallel classes in junior middle school with forty students in each class and it lasted two months. Questionnaire and tests were used as the experiment instruments in this research. Before the experiment, the pre-questionnaire was adopted in these two classes in order to learn about students’ interests to reading class and their attitude towards textbook-centered reading teaching and the pre-test aims to examine that the two classes are almost at the same level. In the meantime, one of the class, class 3 was chosen as the experimental class, employing English newspaper reading teaching,While class 2, as the control class adopted only textbook-centered reading teaching. These two classes were taught by the same method. At the end of the experiment, both classes were used post-questionnaire and post-tests to prove the effectiveness and feasibility of the application of English newspaper reading teaching in experimental class. According to the data analysis and the results of this experiment, it is confirmed that English newspaper reading training can increase student’s interests and enhance students ’overall reading ability.In general, this research made a good exploration about how to effectively improve junior students reading interests and reading ability by employing newspaper, which have great implications in further English language learning and teaching. In the end, this paper also pointed out some study limitations and given some proposals for English newspaper reading teaching, which will push more English teachers to apply newspaper into their own teaching practice.