| The new curriculum standard of English for senior high school(2017 Edition)points out that in order to cultivate students’ English core literacy,in English teaching,the teacher should guide students to adopt autonomous and cooperative learning methods to participate in the activities of exploring the meaning of theme,mainly including focus on improving students’ ability of obtaining information,processing information,analyzing and dealing with problems in English,as well as developing their ability of thinking and expression in English.Reading Circles is similar to Literature Circles that was adopted in the United States as early as the 1990 s,which is a kind of reading activity in which students read,discuss and share independently(Furr,2007).It is helpful to stimulate student’s reading interest and improve their reading ability.At present,many researches based on mother tongue on Reading Circles have achieved positive results,most of which focus on primary school,junior high school and University.There are a few studies related to Reading Circles in senior high school,and most of them use extracurricular reading materials as research content.The author tries to use curricular reading materials as research content to explore the effects of Reading Circles on senior high school students’ English reading attitudes and reading ability.The purpose of this study is to use reading circles activity to carry out experimental research and the author put forward the following research hypotheses: 1.Reading Circles can improve students’ English reading attitudes in terms of affective,behavioral and cognitive domains.2.Reading Circles can improve the achievements of students’ English reading comprehension in their test and further improve their English reading ability.85 students from Grade 1 of XX Senior High School in XX County,U city,Inner Mongolia participated in the experimental study.The whole experiment lasted for 16 teaching weeks,in which the pre-test and pre-study questionnaires of two classes were carried out to figure out the achievements of students’ English reading comprehension and reading ability;four stages of reading circles activity were conducted;the post-test and post-study questionnaires of the two classes were carried out;as well as the interview with the students in the experimental class.The software SPSS 21.0 was used to analyze the results quantitatively and the interview data was transcribed and discussed qualitatively.The qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis showed that: 1.Reading Circles has positive effects on students’ English reading attitudes.Students’ reading attitudes in affective and cognitive domains have been improved significantly.2.Reading Circles can improve the achievements of students’ English reading comprehension in their test and further improve their English reading ability.Besides,the author also found that after the reading circles activity,the students not only formed good reading habits,but also mastered certain reading skills when completing the practice of reading comprehension.Though the study has some limitations,the author still has the following suggestions for future research.Firstly,in Reading Circles,teachers can try to combine curricular reading materials with extracurricular reading materials which can be selected freely by the students with the styles of English novels,stories and so on.Secondly,in order to further cultivate students’ interest in English reading,teachers need to give proper advice on the materials selection according to students’ knowledge level. |
