Region - Educational Research and Reviews

As the American educator Harvey Daniels first enhanced the concept of reading circles in his book Literary Circle in 1997, many researchers at home and abroad have tried to put this concept into practice. At the same time, with the increasing importance of autonomous reading in English teaching, reading circles has become a great method to improve autonomous reading for practitioners. Moreover, with the rapid development of information technology, online learning has become an important way for college students to learn. As a result, the research occupies a brand new learning mode--online English reading circles. To further verify whether online English reading circles mode can improve college students' autonomous reading ability, this research takes some students of Grade 21-23 English majors at Nanjing Normal University Zhongbei College as research objects. Through analyzing participants' interviews, monthly journal and questionnaire, it is evident that their autonomous reading abilities have improved significantly. Besides, this paper discusses four major implementation steps of the forum for online English reading circles which includes material assignment, model demonstration, roles allocation and online discussion to analyze the aspects that influencing students' change. This research helps us to discover the validity of metacognition strategies which is a prerequisite for researching on autonomous reading ability, and the possibility for the participants to learn how to use the relevant strategies in regular reading and thus improve their autonomous reading ability. The paper explores the new model and strategy of online English learning for college student form reading circle's perspective, which has a certain innovative significance.