Abstract

Reading passages in senior high school are inclusive and related to various subjects but many English teachers do not realize the significance of interdisciplinary knowledge and fail to help students catch the theme through combining interdisciplinary knowledge to the context. Though many researchers have been discussing about the benefits of offering students interdisciplinary knowledge at home and abroad, few people have designed experiments to support the idea that interdisciplinary knowledge supplement plays an important role in learning. This research aims to prove that interdisciplinary knowledge supplement is necessary from these two ways: one to analyze the interdisciplinarity of the present English textbook and the other to testify that the interdisciplinary knowledge supplement can raise students’ reading comprehension ability.

This research takes the method of quantitative analysis to study the interdisciplinarity of High School English textbooks. The distribution of interdisciplinary subjects in High School English textbooks is calculated. It also conducts contrast experiments to testify that interdisciplinary knowledge supplement can improve reading comprehension ability of high school students The 40 participants who are all at the similar level of English mastery are divided into 2 groups, one as experimental group of which students are supposed to study interdisciplinary knowledge first and then do the relevant reading comprehension tasks; the other is used as a control group, in which students are asked to do the reading comprehension task directly. 

The results show that the content of English textbook involves a large number of interdisciplinary knowledge. What’s more, students who have studied the interdisciplinary knowledge have higher accuracy of the tasks. And this difference is much more obvious on the theme-oriented questions than on the detail-oriented questions. Therefore there comes the conclusion that supplementing interdisciplinary knowledge is feasible in senior high school and can truly improve students’ reading comprehension ability. Based on these main findings, some suggestions are put forward for teachers and students respectively.

Keywords：Interdisciplinary knowledge supplement; English teaching; High School

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

1. Introduction-2

1.1 Research Background-2

1.2 Research significance-2

1.3 Research purpose-2

2. Literature Review-4

2.1 The Definition and Significance of interdisciplinary knowledge supplement-4

2.2 Studies on the improvement of reading comprehension ability through interdisciplinary knowledge supplement-5

2.3 Researches on the interdisciplinarity of English textbook for senior high school-6

2.4 Conclusion-7

3. Methodology-8

3.1 Research Questions-8

3.2 Participants-8

3.3 Instruments and Procedure-9

4. Results and Data Analysis-12

4.1 Analysis of High School English Textbooks-12

4.2 Analysis of the experiment-14

4.2.1 Group performance-14

4.2.2 Individual performance-18

5. Conclusion-22

5.1 Major Findings-22

5.2 Suggestions-22

5.3 Limitations-23

References-24