The Comparative Study Of Task-Based Reading Comprehension And Multiple Choice Reading Comprehension

Reading ability is an important ability to learn in junior high schools,and it is also one of the main contents of English examination in middle schools.According to Discourse Analysis and Construction Theory,reading comprehension requires students to integrate contextual information,which examines students’ comprehensive language ability to a certain extent.The test types of reading comprehension mainly include multiple choice reading comprehension and task-based reading comprehension in middle schools.Different types of reading comprehension will have different effects on reading ability.Therefore it is necessary to study these two types of reading comprehension in depth.This thesis attempts to make a comparative analysis of two different types of reading comprehension to explore which is more effective in improving students’ comprehensive language ability from different perspectives.This research has the following three research questions:1.What attitudes do the students hold toward task-based reading comprehension and multiple choice reading comprehension?2.What differences are there in improving students’ comprehensive language competence between task-based reading comprehension and multiple choice reading comprehension?3.What differences are there in difficulty and discrimination between task-based reading comprehension and multiple choice reading comprehension respectively?The subjects of this study are 90 junior students from two parallel classes in Grade Two of No.27 Middle School in Shenyang,which are chosen as a Class1-TB and an Class2-MC respectively.In the experimental process of this research,it mainly includes tests,a questionnaire and an interview.During the training process,task-based reading comprehension training is used in Class1-TB,while multiple choice reading comprehension training is performed in Class2-MC.At the same time,the author makes a comparative analysis of the difficulty and discrimination of the two kinds of reading comprehension in Class1-TB and Class2-MC respectively.Finally all the data is collected and sorted.SPSS19 is used to quantitatively analyze the results of tests and questionnaires.The results of the interview are qualitatively analyzed.The main findings of this study are as follows.First,students have a more positive attitude towards multiple choice reading comprehension than task-based reading comprehension.Second,task-based reading comprehension is more effective than multiple choice reading comprehension in improving students’ comprehensive language ability.Finally,the difficulty and discrimination of task-based reading comprehension are higher than those of multiple choice reading comprehension.Moreover,this study supplies useful reference for future research in this field.