A Study Of Pre-reading Activity In English Reading Classes In Junior High School

As EFL learners,the main learning field for Chinese students is school education.And it's self-evident that English reading is the main opportunity for Chinese students to input English language knowledge and foreign culture.In the process of reading English reading materials,the students can not only know about the foreign culture,get information but also learn and consolidate the new words or phrases,get familiar with the appropriate usage of the target language in the specific context.As one of the most significant parts of English reading teaching,the effective pre-reading activity can not only activates students' reading interest,but also stimulates or supplements the cognitive schema about the reading content that students need.The widely awareness about the significance of the pre-reading activity has attracted the attention of the scholars and front-line teachers.Though they've done many researches about how to conduct the pre-reading activity,the effectiveness and the appropriateness of the pre-reading activity in the current junior high English reading teaching are still secrets.This study is trying to answer the following questions: 1.What are the teachers' and students' opinions about the pre-reading activity? 2.Does the current pre-reading activity obey the designing principles of pre-reading activity? 3.Is the current pre-reading activity effective in terms of reaching its goals?In this study,the researcher first explores the answers by using the questionnaires,interview and classroom observation.Then the researcher analyzes the data through Microsoft Execl 2010.Next,the researcher draws conclusions and finds the problems in the current pre-reading activity.At last,the researcher attempts to propose some suggestions to solve the problems,and applies these suggestions in the real classroom reading teaching.The major findings of this study: 1.The current pre-reading activity is rich of selectivity,brevity,and operability.But it is lack of interest,and subjectivity.2.The current pre-reading activity can effectively activate or supplement the students' cognitive schema about reading material,but it's effectiveness on activating the students' interest to read is questionable.3.Among the linguistic schema based pre-reading activity,content schema based pre-reading activity and the form schema based pre-reading activity,the content schema based pre-reading activity is the most effective one and the form schema based pre-reading activity is the least effective one.4.The most frequently used pre-reading activity is the linguistic schema based pre-reading activity,and the form schema based pre-reading activity is the least frequently used.Based on the previous researches,this study mainly investigated the current situation of the practical usage of pre-reading activity.After pointing out the problems,the researcher proposed some suggestions and applyed the suggestions into the real classroom teaching.At last,the researcher investigated the effectiveness of these suggestions.With all of these hardworking,the researcher hopes this study can help the front-line teachers,especially the novice and new teachers to improve their teaching skills,and attract more and more researchers to pay attention to the study of pre-reading activity.