An Empirical Study On KWL Model In Senior High School English Reading Teaching

Reading plays an important role in English learning.English reading ability is the foundation of the development of other language abilities of English learners.However,the current situation of senior high school students’ English reading class is that English teachers pay too much attention to teach the knowledge in the textbook because of college entrance examination,students rely on teachers to learn knowledge passively,so that the students’ reading level is not high.Facing the current situation in senior high school English reading teaching,some new teaching modes were proposed.“KWL” model is one of the new teaching approaches which was advanced by Donna Ogle.(KWL represents three steps of teaching,KWL is the abbreviation for Know,Want to know,and Learn.)The paper aims to apply KWL model to transform the current situation as well as to verify whether it can improve students’ reading interest,classroom participation and reading achievement in senior high school.In order to have a clear picture of KWL model carried out in senior high school,the author did an empirical study and tried to answer the following three research questions:Question 1: To what extent does KWL model affect students’ English reading interest?Question 2: To what extent does KWL model affect students’ classroom participation?Question 3: To what extent does KWL model affect students’ English reading achievement?This study was carried out in Wafangdian No.3 Senior High School in Liaoning province and it lasted for a semester from September 5,2020 to January 13,2021.96 students from two classes in Grade Two of senior high school were chosen as experimental participants.Among them,Class 1 was selected as the Experimental Class(EC),and Class 3 was selected as the control class(CC).Before the experiment,the researcher selected their English reading scores of the final test paper of the second semester of senior 1 as the pre-test scores,then the researcher did the pre-questionnaires on interest and classroom participation in English reading to ensure the same level of the students in the two classes.During the experiment,the students of the two classes were taught the same textbook by the same teacher,and they had the same learning time.The only difference was that reading teaching approach based on KWL model was applied in EC while CC was taught by traditional teaching method.At the end of the experiment,the researcher selected their English reading scores of the final test paper of the first semester of senior 2 as the post-test scores,meanwhile,the post-questionnaires and an interview were conducted to investigate the effectiveness of KWL model in senior high school reading teaching.The research instruments of this study included questionnaires,interview and tests.Based on the analysis of data by SPSS 19.0,the research findings can be summarized that KWL model is an effective teaching approach,it improved the students’ reading interest,classroom participation and English reading achievement to a certain extent.