An Experimental Study On The Influence Of Cognitive Context On The Reading Teaching In Junior Middle School

As for middle school students, English reading plays an important role in English learning. Still English reading occupies the biggest proportions among listening,writing and speaking in senior high school entrance examination. Therefore it is necessary to improve middle school students’ reading ability and teach them some reading strategies in the reading teaching class. However, the traditional reading teaching method lays particular stress on teaching the words, phrases and grammar points and overlooks cultivating students’ reading abilities. Over the years, lots of researches have been made on the English reading teaching by many experts at home and abroad. Meanwhile some achievements are obtained by those researches.However, the English reading research is rarely conducted from the perspective of Cognitive Context. The context was always considered as static before. With the development of cognitive science, Sperber and Wilson put forward the Cognitive Context, which is the key concept of Relevance Theory. It is a psychological construct,because it not only contains the physical environment where the communication happens but also cultural knowledge, assumptions, faith, memory and expectations for the future. Reading is the communication between the writer and reader. It is an ostensive-inference process. Therefore the Cognitive Context can be used to guide the reading teaching.This study conducted an experiment study in order to explore the function of Cognitive Context on English reading teaching in middle school. It tries to answer the following questions:(1) Can the reading teaching method implemented with Cognitive Context improve middle school students’ reading competence?(2)Can the reading teaching method implemented with Cognitive Context produce beneficial effect on middle school students’ awareness of using reading strategies? Thus, the author conducted teaching experiment in two parallel classes in a middle school of Guangzhou during four months and each class was taught by the author with different teaching methods. The control class was taught with the traditional method, while theexperiment class was taught with reading teaching method implemented with Cognitive Context. The pre-test and the post-test were conducted to find out the change of students’ English proficiency before and after the experiment. Meanwhile the questionnaire and interview were conducted to know students’ awareness of using reading strategies before and after the experiment.Through analyzing the data collected, the following conclusions are reached:(1)The reading teaching method implemented with Cognitive Context can improve students’ reading ability.(2) The reading teaching method implemented with Cognitive Context can enhance students’ awareness of using reading strategies.At last, the author points out the limitations of this study and offers some suggestions for the study in future.