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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background

As higher vocational colleges expand on a large scale，the students’ literacy level is gettingworse and worse. The entering score of students in some vocational colleges has dropped to lessthan two hundred points in recent years. In addition, the teaching periods of public courses,such as math, English, have been reduced greatly. However, with the development of the society,the requirements of college students’ English level is becoming higher and higher. All thesefactors bring to the consequence that reading has become the main content in English teaching.So the improvement of students’ reading ability is an important teaching aim in current Englishteaching research.As a specific educated group, students in higher vocational college whose cultural level islower than ordinary university students obtain its own particularities. Various pressures, such asexamination and job hunting, force students to learn English well. However, in the process ofteaching, the author finds that students’ anxiety from learning English is far higher than thosefrom other subjects. Not having good English foundations, they feel completely in the darkabout how to learn English well and suffer much more anxiety. Students seldom answerquestions actively to avoid making mistakes. Their Foreign learning anxiety (FLA) has greatlyinfluenced their learning achievement, especially in reading. Unfamiliar with words andstructures in reading materials, students feel psychological disorder in reading, which tends tocause distraction and then make reading incoherent and finally affect the whole understandingof discourse. Studying like this in long run leads to high reading tension and anxiety.Meanwhile, the atmosphere in English reading class is dull and most of the students areunwilling to join in class activities due to the obsolete teaching method which has furtheraggravated the students’ reading anxiety. The teacher tends to teach reading by translatingwords and sentences of the context and few chances are given to students to think and speak.Investigation of He Aihong (2008) and Zhao Nie Wenjie (2009) shows that Non-Englishmajors really suffer high degree of foreign language reading anxiety (FLRA) and students’English achievement and their reading anxiety are negatively correlated. In other words, FLRAhas negative effect on English learning of non-English majors and the higher anxiety level theysuffer, the worse reading achievement they got. Thus, effective teaching methods are required tocreate low anxiety classroom environment so that students can study with relaxed and positiveattitude. As a result, students’ reading anxiety will be alleviated and their learning achievementwill be improved.Then, what kind of teaching method can effectively alleviate the students’ reading anxiety?Lots of methods including cooperative learning have been put forward. Jigsaw is one of therepresentative methods of cooperative learning (CL) especially used in English readingteaching. For many teachers have combined Jigsaw with English reading classroom, Jigsaw isoften called Jigsaw Reading. Now Jigsaw has been improved to the fourth generation-Jigsaw Ⅳwhich absorbed the essence of various CL methods to become more mature and suitable for theEnglish reading teaching.

1.2 Significance of the Study

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