An Empirical Study On Combined English Reading And Writing Of Simplified Novels In Junior Middle School

Combining reading with writing is one of the new English teaching modes which has,to some extent,begun to influence students’ reading,writing and even overall language capacities.However,the separation of the two still dominates the current junior high English teaching:Few experiments have been conducted to combine writing with extracurricular reading.This study aims at exploring whether the combination of the two upon simplified English novels(Bookworm Series)can respectively improve the students’reading and writing confidence,behavior and performance,and whether the combining promotes their comprehensive level as well.This experiment,guided mainly by Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis and Merrill Swain’s output theory,has chosen the students of Nantong Xiaohai Middle School as the subjects,to investigate the effect of combining English reading and writing in junior middle school.The author takes Class 5,Grade 8 as the experimental class and Class 1,Grade 8 as the control class,each with 40 students.The experiment lasts one semester plus one winter vacation(early February--end of June,2018),during which the experimental class chooses level-one up and level-one down of Bookworm as the extracurricular reading materials,and combines reading with various types of writing,while the control class merely adopts the conventional way of reading.The research tools employed are "Junior High,English Reading and Writing Questionnaire" adjusted from Wang&Yu(2008),Yan&Han(2008),Guo&Qin(2010);the semi-structured interviews of five students at different levels;and the two tests(Grade 8 final exams of 2017-2018 Nantong Development Zone)conducted before and after the experiment to check the change of performances.Aided by SPSS 16.0 and EXCEL2007 to process the statistics from the questionnaire and tests,this study concludes that the combination of reading and writing based on the simplified English novels can greatly enhance the students’ confidence in reading and writing,effectively change their attitude and behavior towards the two,and significantly improve their performance of English reading,writing,even their general proficiency.It is hoped that this empirical study may provide certain reference for all-level English reading and writing teaching.