A Survey On The Effectiveness Of English Reading Task Design Based On Core Competencies In A Junior Middle School

According to the English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022),students’ core competencies,such as language ability,cultural awareness,thinking capacity and learning ability should be cultivated in English courses.Reading as an essential component of English teaching plays a significant role in cultivating students’ core competencies.Scholars at home and abroad conducted a series of studies on reading task design,of which empirical studies mainly focused on improving students’ language ability.Domestic research puts effort into expounding the concept of core competencies and exploring the principles or strategies of reading task design combined with lesson examples.There was a lack of systematic empirical research to investigate the effectiveness of reading task implementation under the guidance of core competencies.Therefore,this study attempted to investigate the effectiveness of reading task design based on core competence and obtain teaching implications through data collection and analysis.This study aimed to answer the following three research questions:1)What’s the teachers’ philosophy of reading task design?2)How well doess the teachers’ reading teaching tasks design match the goal of cultivating students’ core competencies?3)To what extent do students achieve reading learning objectives?This study adopted questionnaire,classroom observation,interview and text analysis as instruments to examine the effectiveness of reading task design based on core competencies.27 English teachers and 137 students at a junior middle school participated in this study and completed questionnaire and interview.Text analysis and classroom observation also served as tools to collect data.The data was organized and analyzed to investigate the effectiveness of reading task design on four dimensions of cultivating students’ core competencies,including language ability,cultural awareness,thinking capacity and learning ability.The findings of the results comprised three aspects: Firstly,a majority of teachers laid emphasis on explaining language knowledge and they lacked their own philosophy to design reading tasks.As to their perceptions of reading task design based on core competencies,they kept a supportive attitude,but few of them had a profound understanding of the concept of core competencies.These English teachers were willing to design reading tasks based on their teaching experience or by referring to excellent lesson examples,focusing on improving students’ testing scores.Secondly,when designing reading tasks,English teachers focused on cultivating students’ language knowledge and reading skills,which matched the goal of language ability to a high degree but had low consistency with the goals of learning ability,cultural awareness,and thinking capacity.Thirdly,concerning students’ performances in completing reading tasks,students achieved the goal of language ability at a high level,but their performances in achieving the goals of thinking capacity,learning ability and cultural awareness need further developing.According to the results,the study offered pedagogical suggestions on how to design reading tasks effectively: from the macro level,teachers should update their teaching ideas and methods,such as paying attention to theory learning on core competencies and regarding cultivating students’ core competencies as an important task to foster students’ virtue development through education.Meanwhile,students should develop themselves by achieving the goal of core competencies.In terms of a specific method to design reading tasks and objectives,teachers should interpret the texts from three aspects: text themes,authors’ intentions for writing,and text structures.Also,English teachers are supposed to focus on the cognitive levels of reading comprehension to cultivate students’ critical thinking by designing reading tasks for predicting,inferring,questioning,and evaluating.Meanwhile,teachers should pay attention to promoting students’ learning ability by teaching them learning strategies.When designing reading tasks involving cultural knowledge,teachers should also compare different cultures and help students understand them.To promote students’ creative thinking,teachers are supposed to design creative reading tasks and encourage students to imagine.Some limitations still exist in this study;for example,there is a strong degree of subjectivity in defining the effectiveness of reading task design.And the sample of participants is limited,which can only represent the current situation of a region.In terms of the instruments for the research,this study lacks objective items to evaluate students’ performances in completing reading tasks to achieve the goal of core competencies.