The Application Of Adverbial Conjunctions-based Teaching Model To English Reading Instruction In Senior High School

There’s no doubt that English reading plays an exceedingly crucial part in English learning,especially for senior high school students(abbreviated as SHSS),since the reading comprehension part accounts for a large proportion in the English test of College Entrance Examination(abbreviated as CEE).Moreover,in recent years,CEE has put more and more emphases on testing students’ reading comprehension ability,which is well manifested in the increase of the length of reading materials,difficulty of the materials,and the number of comprehensive test questions.Now,the reading comprehension questions no longer only ask students to directly find correct answers in the reading materials,but request them to have the ability to infer,summarize and guess on the basis of understanding the whole passage and detailed information as well.Hence,teachers spend majority of time on the design and instruction of English reading class.However,according to the questionnaire conducted in senior high school,many SHSS still have problems in effectively understanding reading materials,and one of the reasons is that those students seldom attach importance to the existence and consequence of Adverbial Conjunctions(abbreviated as ACs),which can act as a kind of cohesive device to help students make clear the structure of a passage,the logical relationship among linguistic units,the underlying meanings between lines,and so on.What’s more,some teachers also ignore teaching such type of words in daily reading instruction,which directly results in students lack of awareness of ACs.As a result,this thesis intends to carry out an ACs-based English reading instruction model in senior high school,and at the same time provide some suggestions for English reading instruction in senior high school.The present thesis first introduces the research background,objectives and significance,and the structure of the thesis.Then,it deals with the relevant researches on ACs at home and abroad as well as the theoretical foundations.Moreover,the necessity of applying ACs to reading instruction is described in detail.To testify whether the ACs-based English reading instruction model can help improve SHSS’ reading comprehension ability,the author conducted a teaching experiment,collected data from pre-and post-questionnaire and the pre-and post-test and further analyzed the data with the help of SPSS 16.0 software.The major findings are: after the ACsbased English reading instruction model,1)there’s an evident improvement in the mean score of students’ reading comprehension part in EC;2)students’ awareness of ACs and knowledge of ACs have greatly increased;3)students are able to use ACs to better understand the structure,logical relationship and underlying meanings of a reading material;4)students have formed good reading habits and mastered more reading skills.In the conclusion part,the author summarizes the major findings and provides some pedagogic implications on English reading instruction,and the limitations of the present study are also pointed out in this part.