3。3。3 Procedures 6

4。 Results and Data Analysis 8

4。1 The Analysis of the Participants’ Performance in Oral Reading Fluency and Reading Comprehension Tasks。 8

4。1。1 Performance in Oral Reading Fluency 9

4。1。2 Performance in Reading Comprehension 9

4。2 The Analysis of the Relationship between Middle School Boys’ and Girls’ Oral Reading Fluency and Their Reading Comprehension Ability。 10

4。2。1 The Similarity 10

4。2。2 The Differentia 11

5。 Conclusion 13

5。1 Major Findings 13

5。2 Suggestions 13

5。3 Limitations 14

References 15

Appendix 17 

1。 Introduction

English Curriculum Standards (2011)for compulsory education attach great importance to language competence, including listening, speaking, reading and writing。 Among those four basic skills, reading is of tremendous significance, which not only plays a pivotal role in one’s receiving knowledge, but also promotes improvement in one’s listening, speaking and writing。 In other words, students can benefit a lot from their reading, such as enlarging their vocabulary, broadening their horizons, learning whatcan not be learned in the textbooks and so on。 

However, there are a lot of problems existing in students’ reading。 It is ubiquitous that students are confronted with ineffective reading, being incapable of getting the main idea, failure to generalize what they have read, etc, due to various factors, among which, too many new words and complicated sentence patterns are common ones。 Yet, what is worse is that some students don’t have the habit of reading and even dislike reading。 When completing the homework assigned by their teachers, they just choose the answers randomly without reading the passages, let alone think about them。 

With full awareness of the importance of reading as well as those common problems, many educators and teachers have been working on the solutions。 Apart from those well-known factors, many researches have also shown that students’ oral reading fluency can contribute to their reading comprehension to a certain degree (Turkyilmaz, Can, Yildirim&Ates, 2014; Good, Simmons, &Kame’s enui, 2001)。 The suggestion is apparent that teachers can ask students to practice their oral reading fluency in order to improve the reading skills。 There is no doubt that this finding is very meaningful to middle school students since it points out a totally new way in the advance of reading comprehension ability。 Nevertheless, when teachers try to apply it into teaching reading, it is necessary for them to take the gender differences into consideration for boys may behave differently from girls in terms of English learning (Huang, 2013)。 That is to say, based on Turkyilmaz’s main finding, a further study is needed in order to explore whether the relationship between boys’ and girls’ oral reading fluency and their reading comprehension ability is the same or not。 

In this study, 20 girls and 20 boys from grade 9 will be the participants。 After the necessary data about participants’ oral reading fluency and their reading comprehension are collected, they will be analyzed in qualitative and quantitative ways to testify whether the correlation between boys’ and girls’ is the same。 论文网