A Study Of The Effect Of Graphic Organizers On English Reading Comprehension Ability Of Junior High School Students

The world has entered an era of images due to the quick advancement of media technology.In this context,"viewing" has become a new language skill in English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022 version),alongside listening,speaking,reading,and writing.Besides,graphic organizers are proposed to achieve the teaching goal of "structured knowledge" in reading instruction in junior and senior high school.Graphic organizer(GO)is a reading strategy that can present the critical information of a text and the structure of a text visually,facilitating students to understand the main ideas of the text and the relationships between the various parts of the text more straightforward,which improve students’ reading comprehension skills.So,this paper aims to address the following three questions:(1)What impact do graphic organizers have on junior high students’ reading comprehension ability?(2)How do graphic organizers impact the English reading comprehension abilities of junior high students with diverse English proficiency?(3)What do junior high students think about the use of graphic organizers in English reading lessons?For those purposes,this paper adopted quasi-experimental research and survey research.A total of 98 Grade 7 students from two classrooms at a junior high school in Guangzhou were chosen as the research participants,with 49 students in each class,and a similar number of boys and girls in each class,with no significant difference in the average reading level of the students before the experiment.The trial lasted seven weeks,and one class was taught English reading using a graphic organizer,while the other class was taught without mentioning graphic organizers as a control class.Following the experiment,the two classes finished a reading comprehension test and the students in the experimental class completed a questionnaire.The results revealed that although the effect of graphic organizers on overall reading comprehension ability was not significant,the study revealed that the use of graphic organizers had a significant positive impact on the reading comprehension ability of low-proficiency students.For middle-proficiency students,graphic organizers were found to improve their English reading comprehension ability,although the level of improvement was not significant.Surprisingly,the data did not show any promoting effect of graphic organizers for high-proficiency students.Nevertheless,it is worth noting that most students expressed a preference for using graphic organizers in their reading.This paper suggests that the use of graphic organizers should be tailored to students’ English proficiency levels.After initial training,students with high proficiency should be encouraged to create their own graphic organizers independently,while those with low and middle proficiency may still require teacherstudent collaboration,with the teacher providing a partially completed graphic organizer.With further training,low and middle proficiency students can gradually transition to creating their own graphic organizers with the teacher’s facilitation.Additionally,future research on the use of graphic organizers for English reading comprehension could explore combining graphic organizers with other teaching methods to achieve even better results.