Empirical Study On Junior Middle School English Reading Teaching From A Positive Psychology Perspective

National Senior High School English Curriculum Standards（2020）points out that teachers should give adequate attention to students’ central role in teaching,help students remove psychological barriers,improve their interest in learning and build confidence.Undoubtedly,this is consistent with the primary theoretical proposal of Positive Psychology in the past two decades.Positive Psychology aims to explore the positive factors in human nature and affirm the value of human-beings in society,and its application has become increasingly widespread.In recent years,Chinese scholars have paid attention to the significance of combining Positive Psychology and English teaching.Quite a few scholars focus on the critical role of various factors in teaching such as students’ emotional state and their personality traits.Still,the potential of applying Positive Psychology in English teaching,especially in reading teaching,has not been fully explored.Based on the above research background,this research explores the impact of teacher’s interventions based on Positive Psychology in junior middle school students’ English reading teaching with the help of theoretical resources of Positive Psychology,such as Subjective Well-Being Theory,Broaden-and-Build Theory,and Self-Determination Theory.The research project takes two classes of eighth grade in Hefei as research participants in this research.Through questionnaires and interviews,it tries to answer the following research questions:1.What’s the current status of the students’ Subjective Well-Being,their use of reading strategies,and their reading scores in English reading teaching?2.How can the teacher’s intervention based on Positive Psychology be designed and implemented in English reading teaching?3.What are the effects of applying intervention based on Positive Psychology in junior middle school English reading teaching on students’ English reading competence?This research takes two junior middle school classes as the experimental and the control classes,respectively.For the experimental class,the author adopts a variety of interventions based on Positive Psychology at the different stages of reading teaching,such as atmosphere building,cooperative learning,and optimization of evaluation method.The teacher just teaches reading with traditional methods in control class and does not give more explicit psychological hints or guidance.Before and after the experiment,the changes in reading strategies and students’ Subjective Well-Being are observed through questionnaires and interviews.In addition,this paper takes the scores of the reading test of September and those in December in Hefei as the pre-test and post-test,and the obtained data are analyzed by SPSS 26.0to observe the influence of Positive Psychology applied to reading teaching on reading scores.According to the research results,for junior middle students,their Subjective Well-Being is not sufficient,reading strategies are not used by them frequently,the reading scores among them are not evenly distributed in the current English reading teaching.Through this experiment,it can be seen that students’ reading competence has been significantly improved,which is mainly reflected in: students’ Subjective Well-Being is enhanced and they can consciously use reading strategies to promote learning,and their reading scores are also improved.