An Empirical Study On The Application Of Embodied Cognition Theory To English Reading Teaching In High School

With the revolution of English curriculum,English reading comprehension plays an important part in the National Higher Education Entrance Examination.The score accounts for 40% of the total score.Except the reading comprehension,the other parts also investigate the students’ reading ability.Most of the students can not get high scores in the part of the reading comprehension.In the traditional English reading classes,the teachers always translate the reading articles into Chinese.The students’ understand about the reading articles is on the surface and the students can not fully take part in the English reading classes.As a result,they have lost interest in the English reading.Especially,the average scores of the students in the mountain are lower.The English teaching level in the mountain area is weaker than the other cities,so the English reading ability of the students in mountain area needs to be improved at once.The theory of embodied cognition has grown up since 1980 s.Lakoff and Johnson came up with the theory.The theory shows that the cognition is situational and focuses on the idea that the form of the cognition comes from the interaction among the mind,the body and the environment.It has great influence in different fields.Especially,the theory of embodied cognition can promote the development of education.It stresses the embodiment and the situationality of the human body.The metaphor thinking which came from the thinking of Lakoff and Johnson is important to the embodied cognition theory.With the help of the metaphor thinking,the cognition will be formed and developed when the human body is interacting with the external environment.Based on that,explore the concrete methods to inspire the students’ interest in high school.With the methods of literature research,questionnaire,interview and experiment,the author referred to the past study theories at home and abroad,then came up with the English reading teaching strategies based on the embodied cognition theory and combined the embodied cognition with the English reading teaching into practice.The research chose two parallel classes as the experimental class and the control class in the senior high school in the mountainous area.With the single variable principle,the students in the experimental class were taught by the English reading teaching method based on the embodied cognition theory,and the students in the control class were taught by the traditional English reading teaching method.This research aims to verify the following assumptions:(1)The English reading teaching based on the embodied cognition in the senior middle school can inspire the students’ interest and improve the students’ participation in English reading class;(2)The English reading teaching based on the embodied cognition in the senior middle school can improve the students’ reading performance.After the experiment,the author find that it is effective to introduce the theory of embodied cognition to the English reading teaching.The experimental result shows that the English reading teaching based on the embodied cognition theory can not only improve the students’ reading ability,but also inspire the students’ reading interest.