Promoting Senior High School Students’ Reading Skills Through Process Summary Writing

English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017)points out that the purpose of English learning is to cultivate students’ comprehensive ability to use English.In the stage of compulsory education,the overall goal of English curriculum is to further improve students’ English reading ability.Reading and writing are very significant in English teaching.However,reading and writing are not integrated effectively at present.A large number of teachers focus on teaching students important language points,but ignore the development of students’ reading skills including the comprehension of the meaning of the text and the text structure.One of the ways to tackle this problem is to implement the teaching strategy of the write-to-read construct.The write-to-read construct means that before a reading class,teachers should first tell students that after learning this article,they have to finish a summary writing.This method can fully stimulate students’ learning enthusiasm,and they will concentrate on the meaning and structure of the text.The combination of summary writing and reading teaching enables students to read the article through writing,so as to promote students’ reading skills.Summary writing is of great benefit to improving students’ comprehensive ability.Different from other types of writing with fixed genre,the original text may vary from narration,argumentation or exposition.This paper will use the process writing method to guide students to write a summary,which can reduce the task difficulty and students’ anxiety in summary writing.By process summary writing,students’ focus of reading can be changed from the language points to the meaning and structure.On the basis of comprehending the text as a whole,students can be led to concentrate on the logic and content.Consequently,their reading skills including comprehension of the meaning of the text and the text structure can be promoted effectively.Based on the write-to-read construct,this thesis attempts to explore the influence of process summary writing on students’ reading skills.The research questions are as follows.1.What effects does process summary writing have on the students’ comprehension of the meaning of the text?2.What effects does process summary writing have on the students’ comprehension of the text structure?The effectiveness of summary writing was examined by comparing the reading comprehension scores of students in two classes.80 students from two classes in Xuzhou No.1 Middle School were chosen as the research subjects.Before the experiment,a pre-test was conducted in the two classes whose purpose was to ensure that there was no great difference in students’ reading comprehension skills between the two classes.During the experiment,in the experimental class,process summary writing method was used to help students read.After the experiment,the post-test was conducted in the two classes to see whether there were noticeable differences in their reading comprehension skills.Questionnaires,interview and tests were used to test and analyze the English reading skills of students.By comparing the questionnaires of the experimental class,we can draw a conclusion that the students’ attitudes towards summary writing have been significantly improved,they can use reading strategies properly and their focus of reading has been changed.Firstly,students believe that they can understand the meaning and structure of the text better through summary writing.Secondly,students can read the text more efficiently by using proper reading strategies in order to complete a summary.Thirdly,instead of just focusing on the language points,students pay more attention to the meaning and structure of the text.In addition,the results of the pre-test and post-test in EC clarify that students’ skills of summarizing the content,mastering the text structure,predicting and guessing the meaning of words have also been significantly improved.This research is an attempt in the implementation of process summary writing in English reading teaching in senior high schools.Teachers have to guide students to deeply understand the logical structure and content of the text on the basis of overall understanding of the text and improve students’ reading skills.