The Effect Of Text-retelling On Senior School Students’ Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension has played an indispensable part in students’ English learning while senior high school students find it hard to effectively deal with the comparatively complex texts in limited time because they have gotten used to intensive reading during junior high school.Retelling,as the information output,has two expression forms: spoken and written.In our country,a majority of studies focus on the impact of retelling on students’ oral expression and writing ability,but whether it has the equal effect on the reading comprehension is less studied.Actually,in English-speaking countries,retelling has been used as a reading instructional tool for quite a long time.In order to retell a text well,students must comprehend the whole text fully,generalize the central idea and judge the main idea and the details,which,in return,reflects the students’ reading ability.In this research,systematic retelling training was conducted to make clear whether it is feasible and effective to improve senior high school students’ English reading comprehension ability.The research questions of the thesis are as follows:(1)Can the training of text-retelling improve English reading comprehension achievements of senior middle school students?(2)What attitude do students have towards the text-retelling training in the experimental class?In order to explore these two questions,the researcher carried out a two-month teaching experiment in two paralleled classes in Senior One from No.1 Senior High School in Wushan,Gansu Province.One was the experimental class and the other one was the control class.Both classes received the same learning content,but the teaching methods were different: conventional 3P teaching model in the control class while text-retelling was applied in the experimental class.All participants took reading comprehension texts before and after the experiment.The students in EC had an attitude questionnaire at the end of the experiment.The data were analyzed by SPSS 20.0 to draw a conclusion.By analyzing the data from the Pre-test and Post-test,it was proved that the application of text-retelling to senior English reading class was more efficient to improve English reading comprehension achievements.From the questionnaire,we could conclude that students in EC got benefits a lot from text-retelling training,such as the improvement of the reading habits and reading strategies,so most of the students liked text-retelling and held positive attitude towards it.