Research On Junior High School English Learners’ Development Of Textual Competence In Reading Based On Activity-based Approach

The English Curriculum Standards for Nine-year Compulsory Education(2022 Edition)articulates prominently that students ought to be given enough opportunities to be exposed to various types of English texts in internalizing the text structures and linguistic features,pay attention to various component layers of texts,and understand how language is used to convey their thematic meaning.These new ideologies of English language teaching indicate that teachers should highlight textual knowledge in their teaching practices with the purpose of aiding students to develop their textual knowledge and further improve their textual awareness.However,due to the negative impact of the exam-oriented conceptions among many teachers,reading teaching has frequently boiled down to the mere exercises of reading strategies,disregarding the cultivation of students’ text-based higher order thinking skills in the process.And the cultivation of students’ textual competence has not been given enough attention.In terms of the English teaching ideology proposed by the latest national curriculum standards,students’ Textual Competence(TC)should be viewed as an essential ability in language learning.That is to say,reading teaching should involve much more than the mechanical exercise of strategies,but more importantly focus on the textual content and structures,through the practice of which students’ thinking skills can be forged,with the ultimate purpose of developing students’ TC in the process of reading teaching.Based upon such understanding,this study focuses on the research of how junior high school English learners’ TC in reading can be facilitated in engaging in various classroom reading activities by taking Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy(2001)as the theoretical framework and Activity-based Approach advocated by the latest curriculum standards as the research construct.As a case study,it samples a class(N=42)of Grade 8 of a junior high school in Hefei as the research participants and uses classroom observation,reading test and interviews as the research instruments to collect the data during the 12-week empirical study.This study intends to address the following three questions:(1)Which micro-layers of English learners’ ability should be involved in the development of their TC?(2)What is the status quo of junior high school English learners’ TC in reading?(3)In which ways can junior high school English learners’ TC in reading be facilitated?Based on the analysis of the data,the study finds that(1)on the basis of the new curriculum standards and literature review,the development of learners’ TC involves the ability to master cohesion,coherence,context,text pattern,text type,and the content and thematic meaning of the text,(2)currently,junior high school English learners’ TC is relatively low,especially in their understanding of text types,cohesion and coherence,and(3)English reading teaching under the guideline of Activity-based Approach can effectively promote junior high school English learners’ TC in reading.Furthermore,in reading classes,it is believed that teachers should design layered and rich learning activities to facilitate the development of learners’ TC.First,in the activities of learning and understanding stage,teachers should activate students’ existing or prior factual,procedural and conceptual knowledge related to the theme and content of the text,and aid students to develop the awareness toward the topic and the initial overall understanding of the theme.In addition,teachers should also guide students to explore the type and structure of the text.Second,in activities of practicing and applying stage,teachers should create relatively authentic learning activities in which students are able to participate in describing and interpreting the content.Furthermore,teachers should guide students to independently analyze and judge the cohesion and coherence of the text.Third,in the activities of transferring and creating stage,teachers should also be able to cooperate with students to infer and evaluate the thematic meaning,author’s attitude and opinions in the text,and even express their personal views.