An Empirical Study On Input Hypothesis-based Information Gap(IG) Tasks To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Language teaching is mainly manifested in the teaching of listening,speaking,reading,writing and viewing skills.As an important language skill in English learning,reading is also one of the most common and important forms of input.The language input of target language also plays a very important role in foreign language teaching,which directly affects the teaching effect.However,in practical teaching,students’ English reading ability is not ideal in general.How to better stimulate students’ interest in English reading,improve their reading ability,and further improve their English communicative competence is of great significance to English teaching.In communicative language teaching,information gap is one of the important principles that students are required to follow while performing the task-based activities.A successful interaction which is based on information-gap task should be filled with “information gap”,that is,the information held by both sides should be different.Through the way of information exchange,learners can fill the information gap to achieve the completion of communicative tasks.Based on the above understanding,this paper tries to make an empirical study on how to improve senior high school students’ reading ability by using the information gap tasks from the perspective of Krashen’s input hypothesis.The whole empirical study lasted three months.All of the subjects are from Wuhou High School,Shannxi Province.Two senior classes were selected as the main sample subjects.The questionnaire and interview were conducted together with the pre-test and post-test before and after the experiment.The following three hypotheses are the focus of the study:(1)Can the input hypothesis-based information-gap task effectively improve the reading ability of high school students?(2)How to apply the input hypothesis-based information-gap task to the actual English reading teaching in high school?(3)What are the advantages of this method compared with traditional reading teaching?Statistics show that after three-month’s English reading teaching,students in EC have made much more progress than those in CC.The results and findings of this study are as follows:(1)Reading scores of the experimental class are significantly higher than those of the control class,which proves that the input hypothesis-based IG tasks can effectively improve the reading ability of high school students.(2)The case designed by the author in Chapter 5 has clearly shown the specific teaching steps and design ideas which demonstrate the application of the input hypothesis-based IG tasks in reading teaching of senior high school.(3)Compared with the traditional method,the input hypothesis-based IG tasks can firstly increase students’ intake,improve their understanding of the whole context,promote their second language acquisition and then enhance their output;secondly motivate students to focus on meaning rather than on form;thirdly emphasize cooperative learning which effectively reduces students’ class anxiety to some extent;fourthly be conducive to improving students’ practical language application ability and communicative competence in the real-life settings.To sum up,the input hypothesis-based IG tasks can not only be used effectively in senior English reading teaching,but also it has a positive effect in improving students’ reading interest,reading ability and communicative competence.