A Study On The Effects Of Narrow Reading On Junior High School Students’ English Reading Literacy

With the proposal of English reading literacy,much attention has been focused on English reading teaching.However,the current state of junior high school students’ English reading literacy is far from satisfactory.Teachers in most schools still employ traditional teaching methods.As for the students,they don’t form the right attitudes toward English reading.They are afraid of the lengthy passages due to their lack of sufficient vocabulary.Thus,English reading is badly in need of a revolution in the teaching method.Narrow reading,which gains popularity nowadays,is considered by many scholars as a good way out.It aims at reading a large number of articles on a single topic,or of the same genre,or written by the same writer.However,previous studies only focus on ESL students abroad and college students as well as senior high school students at home,neglecting the demands of junior high school students.So,this research is based on the narrow reading theory and aims to testify the effects of narrow reading on junior high school students’ English reading literacy by conducting a series of qualitative and quantitative experiments.Three research questions are addressed here:(1)What effect does narrow reading have on junior high school students’ reading comprehension ability?(2)What effect does narrow reading have on junior high school students’ reading speed?(3)What effect does narrow reading have on junior high school students’ reading character?In this study,96 students from two parallel Grade Eight classes in a certain middle school in Nanjing are determined as research subjects.According to their final English test results at the end of the first year of junior high school,there exists no significant difference in their English competence.So,one is chosen as the experimental class(EC)which is made up of 48 students;the other is the control class(CC)where the number of students is 48 as well.The entire experiment lasts about three months.The first questionnaire is administrated before the experiment to learn about the current state of students’ reading character and the second questionnaire adopted at the end of the experiment is intended to discover students’ changes in reading character.The reading comprehension tests and reading speed tests are designed to provide more objective evidence about the effects of narrow reading.An interview with six students of different proficiency levels in the experimental class is carried out after the experiment to probe into the changes in students’ reading comprehension,reading speed and reading character.Based on the statistical analysis,it is found that the narrow reading method can develop junior high school students’ English reading literacy.Their improvement in three specific aspects can be concluded as follows:(1)They improve their reading comprehension ability.Low-level students make the greatest progress in their ability to extract information.Middle-level students’ improvement in the ability to summarize is obvious.Advanced students are outstanding in their multi-thinking ability and they also perform better in the ability to employ strategies.(2)Their reading speed is greatly accelerated.Underachievers’ improvement in this aspect is not so obvious due to their poor foundations.(3)They also develop their reading character.They read frequently and their reading quantity is also increased.Low-level students change their negative attitudes toward English reading and show an interest in it.Middle-level and high-level students strengthen their reading motivation,master more reading methods and read more voluntarily.However,there is no significant progress in students’ self-evaluation.A conclusion can be reached that narrow reading method is beneficial to English teaching and the research is also of referential importance to those junior high school teachers.When the in-service teachers decide to conduct narrow reading training,they need to take the following things into consideration:(1)The reading materials should be comprehensible and interesting.(2)Teachers should provide sufficient reading materials on certain subjects.(3)Teachers are also required to use various kinds of means to activate the schemata of students.(4)The role of students cannot be neglected,which means that to make the narrow reading training a success,students must participate actively in the process.Of course,there exist limitations in the present study in terms of the experimental period and research subjects.And further studies are needed to extend the time for teaching experiments and contain more participants in the junior high school stage.In addition,more question types should be included in the tests and more time should be distributed to students when they fill in the questionnaires,thus guaranteeing the objectivity and reliability of the research.