The Application Of Inquiry Teaching To English Reading In Junior High School

It is universally acknowledged that English reading plays an important role in students foreign language learning.Especially for the junior high school students,they are going to take the entrance examination to senior high schools and in this examination reading comprehension takes one-third of the total grades.In addition,junior high school students can have more exposure to language material through English reading,which lays the foundation for their further English reading and learning.Effective and extensive reading helps learners to gain a deep understanding of the target language and improve their comprehensive language reading ability.However,previous research finds that problems with traditional English reading teaching method in junior high schools are that students accept knowledge in a passive way,which severely hinders their learning enthusiasm and interest.So,it is quite important and necessary for English teachers to adopt more efficient method in English reading teaching.At the beginning of the 20 th century,Dewey,an American educator,first proposed that inquiry teaching be applied in natural science education.Since then,scholars at home and abroad have been exploring the essence and future development of inquiry teaching,and it as a national science curriculum reform standard and a teaching mode has been applied in teaching practice.Inquiry teaching is based on students’ autonomous and cooperative learning,under the teachers’ guidance,students can ask,explore,discuss and find solutions to problems.Different from traditional teaching methods,inquiry teaching emphasizes teachers’ inspiration and active discovery on the part of students.It has been applied in biology,physics and English grammar teaching etc.,but its application in English reading teaching has not been done yet.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the application of inquiry teaching to English reading in junior high school.This research took two junior three classes of Ningwu Middle School in Shanxi as the research subjects,and used three research instruments: test,questionnaire and interview.A 16-week teaching experiment was conducted in the experimental class(EC)to answer the following two questions:1.What are the effects of inquiry teaching on students’ reading interest,reading strategy awareness,autonomous learning ability and satisfaction with teaching?2.Does inquiry teaching improve students’ English reading performance?By using SPSS,the data of questionnaires,interviews,pre and post reading tests wereanalyzed and it is found that firstly,after the experiment,the control class’ mean scores in reading interest,reading strategy awareness,autonomous learning ability and satisfaction with teaching were not significantly improved compared with those before the experiment.However,the improvement in experimental class was significant.Some students say that they are willing to answer the teacher’s questions in class,and they learn to find mistakes and reflect actively.They can read English passages autonomously after class and apply the acquired reading skills to English reading.Secondly,after the experiment,the control class’ reading performance has improved to a certain extent,but the experimental class’ mean score has increased from 37.18 to 45.4 and the P value is 0.000,indicating that the reading performance of experimental class has been significantly improved.