Action Research On Task-based Teaching Of English Reading In Middle School

Reading is an important part of English teaching.It is an important means for students to acquire information and learn about the culture of the target language.It is also an important way to improve students’ English listening,speaking,reading and writing skills.The English Teaching Syllabus states that the main goals of middle school English teaching are to improve students’ reading ability.Reading has already been the core of curriculum setting,teaching material compilation and testing.It is of great significance to improve English reading for middle school students.From September 2018 to January 2019,the researcher conducted an internship at Shihezi X Middle School.During the teaching practice,the researcher found that the teacher mainly explain and translate the articles by herself.The students’ reading comprehension was poor,so was their grades.The Students showed low interest in reading,and the learning atmosphere was inactive.Students in Grade 9 are going to take the high school entrance examination,so the problems must be solved as soon as possible.After the discussion with the instructor the researcher decided to apply the task-based teaching to the reading.This study follows the basic steps of action research,which is “discovering problems and proposing hypotheses--investigating and confirming problems--developing action plans--implementing--timely adjustment of plans based on feedback collected during implementation--analysis of data based on reading test results,questionnaires,student interview and teacher reflection journal--reflection and summary”.The researcher conducted a two-round action research in the last four months,by means of the task-based teaching.It is applied to 46 students in the Class 1,Grade 9,aiming at improving students’ reading comprehension and stimulating students’ interest and confidence in reading.The researcher worked with the instructor,made a study of the task-based teaching of reading in the middle school by testing,questionnaires,interviews,teaching reflections,and analyzed the data collected by a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.After the whole semester action research,the research findings are: 1.With the application of the task-based teaching,students’ reading ability have improved a lot.There are different degrees of improvement in the subjective meaning,factual details,word meaning guessing and reasoning judgments.The improvement of the subjective meaning is most obvious,followed by the word meaning guessing,the factual details and the reasoning judgment;2.In the English reading class,the task-based teaching mode greatly evokes the students’ enthusiasm for reading and builds up their self-confidence.This study has the following three enlightenments for middle school English reading teaching: first,pay attention to students at different levels;second,design teaching tasks carefully;third,teachers should change teaching concepts.Finally,the researcher put forward specific suggestions in the existing problems in the task-based teaching process in order to provide suggestions for task-based teaching in the middle school teaching of reading.