A Study Of The Effectiveness Of Overcoming Reading Obstacles Through Classroom Questions In English Classes For Junior Middle School Students

The core idea and curriculum standards for the new course impose high requirements on the reading ability of junior middle school students,and they are expected to formulate good reading strategies and develop literacy skills.In the evaluation of students’ English ability,such as the English test in Shanghai high school entrance examinations,students’ reading ability is relatively weak compared with other abilities.In recent years,many teachers have begun to pay attention to the obstacles students encounter in reading.However,due to the inherent weakness of teaching methods or the improper class time allotment,the present reading class cannot effectively help students overcome obstacles.Previous literature shows that classroom questions,as a type of instructional scaffolding can help students understand new words(Ding,2015),read for specific information and detail(Yu,2010),and engage their interest in reading(Chen,2016).However,the participants in those studies are teachers rather than students.Students,as active agents in their learning,should be better qualified to speak on this topic.Therefore,this study aims to verify whether teachers‘ questions can help junior middle school students overcome their reading obstacles.The research questions are as follows: 1.What is the distribution of obstacles middle school students face in reading? 2.What kinds of reading obstacles can classroom questions scaffold students to overcome effectively? 3.How do classroom questions affect students at different levels to overcome such obstacles?This study selected ninth graders from an experimental junior middle school in Shanghai as research participants.Through an analysis of the data collected from the reading test,questionnaire and interview,the reading obstacles junior middle school students suffer from include linguistic and non-linguistic obstacles.The linguistic ones,in the order of seriousness,are obstacles pertaining to vocabulary,genre and discourse.The non-linguistic ones pertain to reading strategies and cultural background.Students at different levels have different opinions about syntactic obstacles.Low level students had greater obstacles in syntax than high level students.Accordingly,this thesis establishes several principles of overcoming reading obstacles through teachers‘ questions.They are: raising well-directed questions to tackle reading obstacles,asking just-in-time questions,selecting the right students to answer the questions,and giving timely feedback.Also,the author conducted a 10-week experiment.The results of experiment and interview illustrate that classroom questions can help students to improve their overall reading abilities.In particular,it can effectively help students overcome reading obstacles pertaining to vocabulary,syntax,discourse,strategies and genre such as exposition and argumentation rather than cultural background.Finally,classroom questions can help high level students to overcome the reading obstacles pertaining to discourse,average level students to overcome the reading obstacles pertaining to strategies and low level students to overcome the reading obstacles pertaining to vocabulary and syntax rather than discourse and strategies.With the scaffolding through classroom questions,students can take the initiative to carry out reading activities instead of practicing learning the basic language knowledge,so as to improve their reading ability and literacy.Therefore,this thesis has reference value and practical significance for junior middle school classroom teaching of English reading.