An Experimental Study On The Application Of Reading Circles To English Teaching In Senior High School

The General Senior High English Curriculum Standards(2020 revised version)advocates adopting such ways as autonomous learning,cooperative learning,and inquiry-based learning in reading instruction to deepen students’ understanding of texts,encourage them to express personal opinions,and develop multiple thinking,aiming to improve students’ overall English subject core competencies.Language ability is the subject basis of core competencies,while language skills are an important embodiment of language ability.Language sub-skills such as summarizing the gist,understanding the details,speculating writer’s attitude and intention,analyzing the structure,and inferring the meaning of words,etc.can be trained through reading teaching.But in current high school English classes,there are still many problems,like teacher-centeredness,knowledge-orientation,and neglecting the cultivation of thinking quality and cooperative ability and so on.Reading circles model can help solve these problems.It combines autonomous learning with cooperative learning and emphasizes in-depth textual exploration.In the process of reading and discussion,students’ reading sub-skills have been improved,thinking quality has been trained,learning ability has been developed,and comprehensive quality has been promoted.Existing researches have shown that reading circles have positive effect on improving students’ reading comprehension ability.However,there are relatively few studies related to the influence of reading circles on reading sub-skills.Therefore,based on constructivist learning theory,cooperative learning theory and autonomous learning theory,this thesis applies reading circles to English reading teaching in senior high school to explore its effect on three common reading skills,namely,analyzing the structure of texts,inferring the meaning of words in context and summarizing the gist of texts.This thesis aims at answering the following research questions: 1)What is the effect of reading circles on senior high school students’ reading skill of analyzing the structure of texts? 2)What is the effect of reading circles on senior high school students’ reading skill of inferring the meaning of words in context? 3)What is the effect of reading circles on senior high school students’ reading skill of summarizing the gist of texts?The researcher selected two parallel classes from Grade 11 of a senior high school in Shenzhou,Hebei Province as research subjects,with a total of 128 students taking part in the12-week experiment.Reading circles model is conducted in the experimental class and the traditional three-step teaching model(PWP)is implemented in the control class.The researcher conducted pre-test and post-test before and after the experiment respectively.The data were sorted out and typed into SPSS 25.0 for descriptive statistical analysis and difference test analysis.After the experiment,six representative students with high,intermediate and low achievement in EC were selected as interviewees to take part in the interview,and the data of the interview is used for thematic analysis.The results of the research are as follows.Firstly,reading circles model can significantly improve students’ reading skills of analyzing the structure of texts.When students read the text,they would not only learn the surface information,but also pay attention to the organizational patterns of the text structure.Secondly,reading circles model can significantly improve students’ skill of inferring the meaning of words in context.Students can solve the questions of guessing the meaning of new words,knowing the use of pronouns more efficiently.Thirdly,reading circles can significantly improve students’ skill of summarizing the gist of texts.Students have got salient improvement in answering questions of grasping the gist of whole text,getting the paragraph’s main idea and summarizing the title.Therefore,the application of reading circles to English reading teaching in senior high school is of great and broad prospects.Based on the conclusions,this thesis puts forward some implications.