| Problem-based learning(PBL for short)with its inception in the 1960s,highlights the placement of problems in real-life contexts to help students solve problems through self-exploration and cooperative discussions.The PBL model,which is conducive to reducing students’ anxiety and to enhancing their learning interests,is often applied to foreign language teaching to examine its effects on the teaching practice.The effectiveness of PBL on students found in previous studies primarily originates from the practice and observation in the realm of higher education,and therefore the conclusions are limited in terms of their generalizability.Additionally,though the scope of the PBL implementation is wide,few studies have applied it to the teaching of reading and quantified the specific effects of this teaching model.In view of these research gaps,our research intends to apply the PBL model to the teaching of English reading in senior high school settings,so as to explore its possible effects on senior high school students’ reading performance.This study attempts to address the following two research questions:(1)Does the problem-based English reading teaching model have any effects on senior high school students’reading performance?If so,why?(2)Does the problem-based learning model have any effects on reading performance for senior high school students of high-proficiency levels and those of low-proficiency levels?If so,why?In order to answer the above-mentioned research questions,two parallel freshmen classes with a total of ninety students,that is,Class Two and Class Twelve,in Yangzhong No.Two Senior High School were selected as the participants in our research.There are twenty-two male students and twenty-four female ones in Class Twelve,while there are twenty-one male students and twenty-three female ones in Class Two.Students in the two classes are similar in terms of their background in learning English and are taught by the same English teacher.Class Twelve was assigned as the Experimental Class and Class Two the Control Class.The teaching of English reading in the Experimental Class was conducted through the PBL model,while the Control Class was taught in the traditional teaching approach.Two varieties of instruments,i.e.,English reading tests,and a semi-structured interview were adopted in our research.As for the pre-test,all students from both classes were asked to complete the reading pre-test for the purpose of finding out whether there were any significant differences in students’ reading performance between the Experimental Class and the Control Class.Meanwhile,the students in each class were divided into the high-proficiency level group and the low-proficiency group according to their scores in the reading pre-test.After a two-month experiment,the researcher administered a reading post-test for the students in these two classes to examine the effectiveness of the PBL model on enhancing students’ reading performance and its effects on the reading performance of the students at various proficiency levels.After the post-test,the researcher randomly selected five students from the Experimental Class for an interview to know more about the changes in their thoughts.The interview was conducted in Chinese and was recorded for the follow-up analysis.Through data collection and data analysis,we have come to the following conclusions.Firstly,compared with the traditional teaching method for English reading,the PBL model exerts significant effects on the improvement of students’ overall reading performance and has a positive influence on the cultivation of their abilities to make analyses and evaluations.As the PBL model emphasizes the process of solving problems,it can help the students gradually learn how to evaluate existing views and detailed information.Secondly,the PBL teaching model and the traditional teaching method for reading exhibit little difference in terms of promoting the overall reading performance of the students with various proficiency levels.The PBL model,however,exerts considerable effects on high-proficiency students’ability to make evaluations and improves the skills for analysis,inference,and evaluation for the students with low-proficiency levels since the PBL model offers students the opportunities to express their ideas from multiple perspectives.With the help of teaching intervention,the students in the Experiment Class,consequently,have learned to analyze the problems and thereafter figure out possible solutions to these problems.This research has some pedagogical implications as follows.First of all,the PBL model can be applied to enhance the students’ reading performance in English and cultivate their abilities to make analyses and evaluations.Meanwhile,it can be used to cultivate the skills for evaluation for high-proficiency level students and develop their skills in terms of analysis,inference,and evaluation for the students at low-proficiency levels.Besides,students’ habit of thinking actively can be cultivated by means of the PBL model.Thirdly,the PBL model facilitates the students to consider problems from various perspectives.It is true that there are some limitations with our study,such as the limited duration of the teaching experiment,the limited size of the samples,and inexperience in teaching and conducting research on the part of the researcher.Future studies are supposed to lengthen the duration of the teaching experiment,include more participants,and enrich the researcher’s experience in teaching and researching so that we can further the studies on the application of the PBL model to English teaching and explore its effects in actual practice. |
