An Empirical Study Of Theme-based Instruction Of English Reading In Junior High School

A variety of English reading teaching methods are now mentioned by many people for the purpose of promoting teachers’ efficiency in daily teaching.The traditional reading teaching pays attention to the explanation of vocabulary and grammar in discourse,while the combination of students’ reading ability and everyday situations is ignored.Theme-based instruction is the most common model for Content-based Instruction.TBI has basic features of Content-based Instruction and also has its own characteristics.TBI suggests that teachers and students study around a certain theme,and the theme is divided into several specific topics,and the text is the main teaching content.Teachers use threads to connect topics in the theme to make the theme logical.Teachers and students use language to complete tasks and acquire language skills in real situations based on the inquiring understanding of learning materials.This study mainly explored the impact of the TBI on English reading in junior high school.The author chose two parallel classes in Grade Eight from Anze NO.2 Middle School as the research subjects.In the four-monthly teaching experiment,the author used quantitative analyses to specifically study the impact of the theme-based instruction on improving students’ participation,reading proficiency,the ability to extract,interpret,entirely perceive and evaluate information in reading competence,writing achievements in reading class.The questionnaire on students’ participation in English reading class was divided into three dimensions: behavioral participation,cognitive participation and emotional participation.The same questionnaires in the pre-test and post-test were studied to analyze changes of students’ participation on the experimental group under the influence of the theme-based instruction.Reading proficiency was tested on CG and EG by independent and paired samples T-test respectively to more accurately determine the impact of TBI on students’ reading proficiency.For the analyses of the ability to extract,interpret,entirely perceive and evaluate information in reading competence,the author combined its test points with reading papers to analyze them more accurately with the help of teachers in internship school by independentsamples T-test.In terms of writing achievements,whether the theme-based instruction can improve students’ writing achievements to achieve learning transfer in reading teaching was discussed through independent and paired samples T-test on experimental group and control group.Through four months’ experimental research,the study proved that:(1)The theme-based instruction can improve students’ participation in three dimensions of behavioral participation,cognitive participation and emotional participation in English reading class by paired samples T-test.(2)The theme-based instruction can improve students’ reading proficiency.After one semester study,the reading proficiency of the two groups has improved,but the reading performance of the experimental group was more significant.(3)The theme-based instruction can improve students’ ability to entirely perceive and evaluate information by independent samples T-test of CG and EG,because scores of experimental group in these two dimensions were higher than that of control group.However,TBI has not achieved obvious results in improving students’ ability to extract and interpret information.(4)The theme-based instruction can promote students’ writing achievements in reading class by the independent and paired samples T-test of CG and EG.