The Necessity of Supplementing Interdisciplinary Knowledge in High School English Teaching

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。89952

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 pided 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

在高中英语教学中补充跨学科知识的必要性

摘要高中英语阅读篇章包罗万象，涉及多门学科知识。但是作者发现大多数英语教师并未意识到补充跨学科知识的重要性，将它与课文内容相结合帮助学生把握文章主旨。国内外有许多学者讨论给学生补充跨学科知识的好处，但是却没有实验来支持为何补充跨学科知识有积极作用。所以此次研究旨在通过以下两种方式证明跨学科知识补充的重要性，一为分析目前英语课本的跨学科内容分布，另一种方式为以对比实验的方式证明跨学知识的补充确实对学生阅读理解能力的提升有促进作用。

此次研究分别采取定量分析法研究高中英语必修教材的跨学科性和对照实验法证实跨学科知识补充对阅读理解能力提高的作用。教材分析部分统计了单元主题和阅读篇章的跨学科科目数量。实验涉及40名学生参与,他们英语水平相当。40名学生分为两组，一组为实验组，需要先学习跨学科知识然后做相关的阅读理解题。另外一组为对照组，直接做同样的阅读理解题。

研究结果显示，高中英语教材涉及大量科目。其次，学习了跨学科知识的实验组阅读理解题准确率更高，试验组略低。其中在主旨把握题目上实验组与对照组准确率相差大于细节题。从而得出跨学科知识的补充在高中具有可行性并且对高中学生英语阅读理解能力有提高作用的结论，在这个结论的基础上，对学生和教师分别提出了几点建议。