An Empirical Study Of The Application Of ARCS Model In Teaching English Narrow Reading To Junior Middle School

Language input plays an important role in foreign language or second language acquisition and reading is a key skill for learners to acquire a non-native language.As one of the four basic skills,reading has become one of the most fundamental focuses in English class.However,nowadays,students are facing many difficulties in reading comprehension because of bad reading habits and the lack of reading interest.Krashen once proposed narrow reading which emphasizes that students should read passages with the same topic or in the same genre or written by the same writer at the very beginning stage of language learning.Then,they can read other materials with different topics or genres and gradually expand the scope of reading.With the help of narrow reading,students can accumulate background knowledge and discourse patterns of a specific topic or genre,which can reduce their reading anxiety and stimulate their reading interest and motivation.Besides,Keller also proposed the ARCS model,which aims to stimulate students' learning motivation from four different aspects.The author combines the ARCS model and narrow reading,and applies this new way of teaching reading to the experiment class in order to investigate whether this new way can actually stimulate students' reading motivation,help students to cultivate good reading habits and eventually improve students' reading comprehension.The author prepares 8 different topics for students in the experiment class and there are 30 passages within each topic.The whole experiment lasts one whole semester.At the end of this experiment,according to the results in independent sample t test and one-way repeated ANOVA of EC and CC students' reading grades,it can be found this way can improve students' reading competence;besides,according to the analysis and discussion of the results of the interviews and the questionnaire,the author finds that the ARCS model can create a high-motivation environment for the application of narrow reading;on the other hand,narrow reading can also further stimulate students' reading motivation.Thus,the combination of narrow reading and ARCS model can improve students' reading comprehension and stimulate their reading motivation effectively.