An Application Study Of Content-based Instruction In English Reading Teaching Of Senior High School

Reading has always been an important part of English learning and the period of senior high school is particularly important to cultivate students’ English reading ability.Nevertheless,although students spend so much time on English reading and make lots of efforts,the benefits are limited,therefore,they become less confident and interested in English reading,even they are afraid of English reading.Thus,they are not active in English reading,moreover,their English reading proficiency cannot be improved effectively.In order to solve these problems,the author carried out the applied research that content-based instruction was applied to English reading teaching in the experimental class in order to improve students’ English reading interest and English reading proficiency.The study in this thesis aims to answer the following two questions:(1)What emotional effects does content-based instruction have on English reading of senior high school students?(2)What effects does content-based instruction have on English reading proficiency of senior high school students? This study was carried out in two classes of Pei Ying Senior High School in Jiangmen City,Guangdong Province.And the subjects were 104 students from Class Five and Class Eight in Grade Ten.Class Five was the experimental class,and Class Eight was the control class.The study started from September,2017 to January,2018.In order to find out the answers to the research questions,two tests and two questionnaires were carried out both in the experimental class and the control class,in addition,the author divided students from the experimental class into three groups based on their pre-test scores,namely,the high-score group,the middle-score group and the low-score group.The author selected five students respectively from the three groups at random and performed the interviews with fifteen students to find out their attitudes and opinions about content-based instruction.The author adopted the qualitative and quantitative analysis methods to analyze the collected data of the pre-test,the post-test,the questionnaires and the information of the interviews.The results of the research showed that compared with the traditional teachingmethod,content-based instruction had positive influence on senior high school students’ attitudes towards English reading and English reading proficiency.Under the guidance of a semester’s CBI reading teaching,not only did students in the experimental class become more active in English reading,but also their English proficiency was improved.In addition,content-based instruction had positive influence on English reading proficiency of the advanced students and the average students.What’s more,the improvements of English reading proficiency of the average students were more than those of the advanced students.Although content-based instruction had positive influence on English reading proficiency of the weak students,the influence on the weak students was not strong compared with that on the advanced students and the average students.To conclude,content-based instruction has positive influence on senior high school students’ attitudes towards English reading and English reading proficiency.Content-based instruction is a teaching method,which is well worth being popularized.