| Reading instruction as an essential part in senior high school English teaching still has problems such as students’ poor enthusiasm for reading,old and boring reading materials and monotonous and predictable teaching model.Under the traditional teaching model,the condition and effects of reading teaching are worrisome.With the increasing popularity and prosperous development of Content Language Integrated Learning(CLIL),a large number of scholars in China have conducted researches on it as well.This mode aims at cultivating students’ ability and awareness of foreign language while learning meaningful content(subject knowledge).While learning subject knowledge,the improvement of language,development of cognitive process and formation of intercultural awareness are also taken into account.Reading lessons as the major carrier of this mode,the measurement and evaluation of it are always contentious.This thesis intends to use Herber’s three levels of reading comprehension theory as the framework to measure reading comprehension ability of students at different levels.With the discussion of the essence and teaching principles in CLIL at length,the research of exploring the effects of this mode on different levels of high school students’ reading comprehension ability is carried out quantitatively and qualitatively.Three research questions are supposed to be addressed:(1)What effects does Content Language Integrated Learning have on literal comprehension of students at different levels?(2)What effects does Content Language Integrated Learning have on the inferential comprehension of students at different levels?(3)What effects does Content Language Integrated Learning have on evaluative comprehension of students at different levels?The study selects a total of 96 high school first-year students from two parallel classes in a four-star high school in Nanjing.Among them,there are 46 students in the experimental class(EC)and 48 students in the control class(CC).According to the results in the placement test and their reading scores in pre-test,there is no significant difference in English proficiency and reading comprehension ability of these two intact classes before the experiment.The author administers a pre-questionnaire survey to look at students’ attitudes and habits towards reading and reading instruction.Right after the tests,6 EC students at three proficiency levels will be selected to give stimulated recall on their reading process so that their thoughts and cognitive processing can be reflected.After the experiment,a post-questionnaire survey is distributed to investigate the changes in EC students’ reading habits and attitudes.Interview are arranged after the experiment in order to obtain students’ suggestions and feedback on teaching.Based on data analysis,it is found that Content Language Integrated Learning can improve high school students’ English reading comprehension ability.Their performance in these three aspects can be summarized as follows: the improvement of students’ literal comprehension is manifested in students’ mastery of topic vocabulary and the improvement of the ability to extract keywords,among which only the improvement of medium level students is significant.All three levels of students have significant improvement in inferential comprehension,which is mainly manifested in understanding and inferencing the internal logical relationship of the events in the passage.Among them,low level students tend to fall into the trap of focusing too much on details in the texts or viewing inferencing as the only resource in their interpretation while high level students view inferencing as a strategy to double check their understanding.The improvement of students’ evaluative comprehension is most evident in low level students,followed by medium level students,which is mainly manifested in students’ attention to the author’s intentions and consciously combined texts with their self-experience thinking.From this we can conclude that the development of CLIL has a certain guiding role for domestic teachers to implement reading instruction.If teachers can find interesting and meaningful reading materials around certain subject knowledge and implement reading lesson in an interactive and instructive classroom atmosphere,students’ reading comprehension ability will be improved.In the process of implementing this mode,teachers should pay attention to the following points:(1)Vocabulary barriers,as the first threshold to reading comprehension,cannot be ignored.Vocabulary teaching cannot be eliminated from reading instruction.(2)In the process of reading,teachers should guide students to pay attention to the logical relationship of events in the text and encourage students to connect their previous knowledge with the text.To achieve this,teachers need to create an interactive and dynamic classroom atmosphere,increase the discussion of opening questions and develop students’ cognitive ability.(3)Teachers should develop students’ good habits in doing reading exercise,demonstrate in the classroom how to correctly carry out stimulated recall and encourage students to do that regularly.(4)Suitable reading materials for students should be recommended and regular reading salon is also necessary,which can not only develop students’ good reading habits and interests,but also reduce the reading pressure in class.(5)The individual differences of students need to be taken into consideration so that clear and appropriate guidance can be given to students.Low level students need large amounts of accumulation of vocabulary and positive encouragement.Medium level students need opportunities to articulate their understanding and to be trained to think logically.High level students need the atmosphere for expressing ideas and opinions freely and appropriate reading materials.Of course,this study still has limitations due to the short experimental time and small research samples.Further research is needed to solve these two problems later. |
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