Chapter One Introduction
The intention of study is to testify whether the Content-based instruction method,namely the CBI, is effective for the reading abilities in senior high school. Thischapter will mainly clarify the background and significance of the study, and thenserves to the purpose of the study and the structure of the whole thesis.
1.1 Background of the Study
As we all know that reading plays a very important role in the College EntranceExamination. It means that reading teaching has become more and more vital.However, the author found some urgent situation that the teachers are employingtraditional teaching method in the current senior high schools when she interned in theschool: to translate the sentences of passages, to recite the vocabulary and grammarpoints by rolls. Therefore, the students cannot experience the interests of learningEnglish. They will lose the interests of English gradually. Because of they have nointerests of English, it is very obvious students will give it up, the results will be moreand more serious.Therefore, as teachers, based on this situation, it is high time that we should beresponsible for improving such circumstance. The thesis intends to employ CBI toteach the reading of senior high school, trying to combine the reading content with thestudents’ daily lives or interests they adore. In doing so, the CBI is more suitable tohelp students with their English reading.
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1.2 Significance of the Study
The significance is to do the research on English reading in senior high schoolbased on CBI, it briefly aims at providing some advice, training students to do someEnglish reading by using CBI in the reality and investigating the thoughts andhypotheses. Firstly, the study can sharply point out the weaknesses of the traditionalmethod applied in the English reading teaching. Therefore, the reform of the teachingmethod is need to be changed immediately.Also, there are some discussions on how to develop the students’ English readingabilities, which after the application of CBI so that to provide some experienceforstudents and English teachers. In the experiment, the author will learn about theadvantages and disadvantages of the CBI, clearly grasping the teaching process andinstruct the further reading teaching. In this way, teachers in the future can promotethe strengths and avoid the weaknesses of the method.The application of CBI method needs to deeply do the researchand to put forwardmany practical ways and suggestions. And, after the thesis which the author hopesthat there are more and more researchers should pay more attention on theeffectiveness of CBI in the future.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
This chapterprimarily introduces the CBI, reading ability and the relationshipbetween CBI and reading ability, also the theories related to CBI are explained. Theauthor also illustrates the situation of current research about CBIboth at home andabroad in this chapter.
2.1 CBI
The CBI has been applied in the experimental classes with the immersion teaching,which originates in Canada from the kindergarten to the senior high school in 1960s.And then was introduced to the foreign language where regards the second languageas the primary and secondary schools in the United States and Britain. With thedevelopment of CBI in foreign countries in 50 years, there are lots of researchachievements. The method has been introducedsince 1994. There is no muchimprovement from 1997 to 2001. From the year of 2002, the CBIis suitable for thetrend of the reformation on the English teaching, it becomes more and more popularin the research of the CBI in our countries.CBI is a teaching method that completely combines the teaching of content andlanguage together. Under the guidance of this method, to get the information anddevelop the language ability are through the language learning. And, the advantagesof CBI is that the method keeps the original language forms, function and significance,based on these, which to enhance students’ motivation, improve their interests andremain the activities that students are familiar with, whose purpose is to improvestudents’ cognitive development.
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2.2 Theoretical foundations
The theoretical foundations of CBI mainly include the cooperative learning theoryand the impact of immersion program. As the purpose of this thesis, it primarily statesthese two theoretical basis.The one theoretical foundation is about cooperative learning, whose purpose is todesign the teaching activities based as students’ independent ability and their interests.The theory mainly focus on the cooperation between students, not just puttingstudents into some groups which the reason of piding groups based on analysis ofstudents and teaching material.The requirements of students who work together andcontributes their efforts to finish the common targets.It is different from the inpiduallearning which mainly learn by themselves, to adopt their own ways and to competewith others, students who prefer to study cooperatively willexchange the information,help each other, learn knowledge from each other, to evaluate others’ ideas and to putforward their own opinions. Moreover, the roles are changed from theteacher-centeredtostudent-centered which is favor of students’ learning. Each memberwill be benefit fromthe discussion of group. In the group, the students will bestimulated their own motivation and aroused the interests. In short, the CBI makes fulluse of the cooperative learning theory in the real classrooms.
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Chapter Three methodology .....24
3.1 Research Questions......... 24
3.2 Subjects ........... 24
3.3 Instruments...... 25
3.3.1 Pre-test......25
3.3.2 Post-test............26
3.4 Teaching Procedure ........ 27
3.5 Data Collection and Analysis.......... 33
Chapter Four Results and Discussion ...... 35
4.1Results........35
4.1.1 Results of Pre-test.........35
4.1.2 Results of Post-test........42
4.2 Discussion.......52
Chapter Five Conclusion...........58
5.1 Major Findings.....58
5.2 Pedagogical Implications...........60
5.3 Limitations of the Study.....62
5.4 Suggestions for Further Research.....63
Chapter Four Results and Discussion
It includes the results, discussion and suggestions for English teachers, also theresults of tests in this chapter. The discussion is mainly about the three researchquestions of this study, namely, discussion on reading abilities: grasping factsanddetails, summarizing main ideas, inferring and judging, understanding the relatedcontents and discussion on the effectiveness of CBI method. In addition, there aresome suggestions for English teachers in further research and teaching.
4.1 Results
In this part, the author mainly illustrated the results of pre-test and post-test in thecontrol class and the experimental class. These results include the analysis of students’total scores and the scores of three specific reading abilities.There are 100 participants in the pre-test, including 50 participants respectivelyin the controlled and experimental class. The pre-test includes three kinds of readingpassage: abilities of summarizing main idea, grasping the details and facts andjudging and inferring total with 30 questions and each question deserves 2 points. Thetotal mark of the pre-test is 60. The author records the scores of the two classes afterpre-test and analyzed with SPSS 19.0. Table 4-1 and table 4-2 present the descriptivegroup statistics of the two classes and the independent-sample test, which clearlyshow the descriptive statistics of pre-test and the difference between the two classeson reading competence.The scores which were from the finalexaminationof Senior 3students in Zhangjiakou were analyzed in the pre-test. The SPSS is used to testwhether the reading level between CC and EC had a big difference. Therefore, thefollowing results of tests guarantee the reliability of the experiments. The dataanalysis of the pre-test between CC and EC are as follows:
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Conclusions
There are four segments in the chapter five. The first part mainly illustrates the resultsof experiment, the second part primarily demonstrates the meanings of research, thethird part briefly state the inadequacies of study, the last part chiefly elaborate theproposal of this survey, which puts forward some advice for the English teachers inthe future, to offer the assistance in applying the CBI to the reading.In the experiment, The author briefly verified the effects of applying the CBI onthree kinds of reading abilities in senior high school. From the chapter four, we haveknown that the results of pre-test and post-test after experiment, which makes it clearly CBI can improve students’ abilities in theaspect ofgrasping factsand details,summarizing main ideas as well as inferring and judging. According to theexperimental data, the brief research findings are listed as follows:Firstly, The CBI is very suitable to teach reading, because it can help the studentsto obtain the necessary language information by seeking the theme and main topiccontent in the article.Therefore, it is to be proved that the CBI can improve students’speed and efficiency of dealing with the questions oflooking for the main ideas. Also,the research findings include that students have learned to pay more attention to thecontent of reading materials, to bring the questions to read the passages is morequickly, they gradually skim the articles, then concentrate their attention on thepassages content, particularly, the contents of who, what, when, where. They form thehabit of focusing on the passage background, theme as well as topic, integrating thetopic together with the theme to understand the questions. The survey also shows thatas the more content information of passage is mastered, the students are confident inthe details and facts of the passages, they have learned to look for the main facts anddetails supporting the theme and topic, they are able to analyze the structure ofarticles, to understand the text clearly. They can form a picture in their mind about thepassages to add the more related details and facts information to the picture, tocomprehend the structures. All of those can help the students to figure out thepassages better.
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References (abbreviated)