As for the second classroom which in foreign countries are more commonly known as open classroom activities, mainly aim to enlarge teaching space. In the sixties in nineteenth century, there had been science fair in Britain. The United States carried out various student summer camp. The national outline of educational legislation pointed out that extracurricular education worked for the development of students' interest and ability, the cultivation of independent consciousness and sense of responsibility, the pursuit of knowledge and interest in science".

In the past decade, many scholars had done a lot of researches about the second classroom to investigate its impact on students' achievements. McNeal (1995) looked into how the second classroom impacts students’ memory capacity. Guest and Schneider (2003) conducted researches on how students benefit from taking part into the second classroom. Other studies have inspected the relationship between the second classroom and improved chances for college attendance (Mahoney et al. 2003; Kaufman and Gabler 2004).

3 Description of the experiment

3.1 Subjects 

The 99 students are from two parallel classes in Linping No.3 Middle School, grade 7. The students of Class 4 and Class 6 involved in the experiment are in Grade seven in Linping No.3 Middle School, a key public middle school in Hangzhou. Class 4 is the experimental class and Class 6 is the control class. In the experimental class, there are 49 students. There are 50 students in the control class.Most of them are between 16 and 17 years old. And they have already received at least four years of formal English training in English as one of their major courses. The two groups are under  the guidance of the same teacher. A pre-test was arranged before the experiment to test whether the students from the two groups are at the same level of reading comprehension and to ensure that there are no significant difference between the two groups.

3.2 The research instruments 

In the research, questionnaire, class observation and proficiency tests are used to collect the data. The pre-questionnaire is made for students to investigate the present situation of junior high school second classroom English reading teaching and their views on English extracurricular reading. The pre-questionnaire is made to investigate students’ attitude towards the second classroom of English reading teaching. And data will also collected by class observation in 1-2 months, as well as proficiency tests. In the class observation, both behaviors, expressions and reactions of students and conduction of the second classroom English reading teaching will be recorded. As for the proficiency tests, the researchers are going to take the pre-test and post-test and record their results. After collection, data will be carefully studied and further analyzed to get the final result.来!自-优.尔,论:文+网www.youerw.com

3.3 Procedures 

This research was conducted over two months, from September to November 2009. 

3.3.1 Pre-questionnaire and Pretest 

3.3.1.1 The pre-questionnaire 

Participants were 99 students from two parallel classes in Linping No.3 Middle School. Class 4 is the experimental class and Class 6 is the control class. They all took the pre-questionnaire.

The pre-questionnaire is consisted of three parts with 16 items in all. Items l-6 was designed to investigate the present situation of students’ English extracurricular reading and the second classroom of English reading teaching in Linping No.3 Middle school, as well as their attitudes and opinions on setting up the second classroom of English reading teaching. Items7-10 was designed to check students’ preference on the choice of English extracurricular reading materials. Items 1l-16 was designed to find out the possible difficulties that may bother students while they are conducting English reading.