Extracurricular English Reading For High School Students: Model Construction And Case Study

The literature review shows that there has been an agreement on the significance of reading, and that there have been numerous theories and researches concerning its teaching approaches and the methods. However, a questionnaire survey reveals that there exist serious problems in English reading (extracurricular reading in particular) among high school students:the limited resources and the boring contents with the reading materials, the monotonous testing measures and the utilitarian evaluating behaviors for the reading effects, the insufficient attention and guidance from the instructors in the reading process, and the negative affective factors and insufficient background knowledge with students. All these, combined together, have greatly affected students’ extracurricular English reading in attitudes, amount, frequency, and effect.Therefore, the author attempts to construct a new experiential model for extracurricular English reading, aiming at helping high school students read more, better and frequently, helping them develop positive attitudes, and promoting their language learning and all-round development. The new model improves the reading materials by combining the daily textbook-related and theme-based reading with the free voluntary reading in spare time; it redesigns the reading process by enriching the pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading tasks, by weakening the oversimplified and utilitarian multiple-choice exercises, and by adding various experiential, functional, communicative and formative tasks; and it optimizes the evaluating mechanism for the reading effect by combining self-evaluation, other-evaluation and mutual evaluation. To test the effectiveness and the feasibility of the new model, a two-year case study has been done, which reveals that the new model may encourage students to read more and frequently, improve their affective factors, enrich their knowledge of various kinds, and help them develop relevant skills and strategies. It is also revealed that this model can help those preparing for College Entrance Exams from Grade Senior One, for it is unlikely to produce obvious improvement in students’scores immediately. Only with long-term practice can students make dramatic progress in reading and in scores in exams.