News Reading Applied To Senior High School English Teaching

In the wake of the popularization of electronic products and the Internet in recent years,online media are rapidly prevailing over traditional mainstream media.Meanwhile,as people live in the context of a fragmented reading and information age,the channels for understanding the world are becoming more diversified,and the speed of obtaining and transmitting information is getting increasingly swift.As a result,the traditional paper book reading has suffered a considerable blow.People manage to learn about domestic and international affairs immediately through apps,official accounts,websites,etc.Furthermore,the content of the texts in NMET(National Matriculation Entrance Test)is way more instant,thoughtful,and educative.Most of the materials are selected from foreign journals.Aside from examining the students' ability to apply the English language,it is also targeted at assessing students' cross-cultural awareness,thinking competence as well as innovation capability.The above dual backgrounds make it possible for English news reading to be applied to high school English teaching.This research is to utilize news reading teaching method in Zhengzhou W School to investigate whether news reading is operable in high school English teaching,whether it can assist students to facilitate their literacy and expand their vocabulary,and whether it is conducive to the cultivation of students' logical and critical thinking.Guided by schema theory,psycholinguistic reading mode,and metacognition theory,a 15-week research into the application of news reading teaching was designed.Initially,241 students in the second grade of this school are determinate investigated subjects,in which 118 students in the Experimental Class(EC)receive news reading teaching while 123 in the Control Class(CC)do not receive it.When the teaching stage ended,all the targeted students sat for a CET 4vocabulary test and a monthly test.After that,the data of students' CET 4 vocabulary test and monthly test scores was collected,and SPSS 21.0 software for statistical analys was employed to observe the effect of news reading.It turns out that the number of the students in EC who have got a higher level of grades is much larger than that of the students in CC.In other words,news reading teaching is considerably efficacious in promoting students' academic performance,vocabulary,comprehending,writing,linguistic ability,etc.Subsequently,a questionnaire was distributed to the students in EC to investigate how satisfied they were with the selected news materials and news teaching course.The response is pretty positive.Eventually,face-to-face interviews were initiated with the teachers involved in the experiment including advisors and 12 students sampled from EC.Through interviews,it has been studied how these students and teachers personally feel about news teaching model,what problems exist in the course of learning and teaching process,and,most importantly,what proposals are offered to ameliorate new reading teaching.Based on the analyses of data and results of research,it can be safely concluded that the application of news reading to English teaching is feasible.Not only is it able to improve students' academic performance,stimulates their curiosity and interest in learning English,but it also develops students' cultural awareness and delivers positive values,and elevates their communication skills,logical thinking and critical thinking.That is exactly why it is well worth circulating among teachers.The study also found that the news material combinations from varied authoritative newspapers or magazines can be used as high-quality curriculum resources in teaching practice,thus enriching the source of news materials.It is expected that this research will give reference for those teachers who aspire to implement English news teaching and encourage more teachers to get engaged in news teaching in their daily teaching practice.