A Study of Using ESP Teaching Model to Promote Reading Comprehension Skills in English Specialized Areas

Abstract

Abstract This paper first investigates the use of the ESP teaching mode in English teaching today and then constructs an English teaching mode based on ESP blended learning to enhance reading comprehension ability. We then examined the sample students’ overall reading skills in terms of content summarization, word decoding, and content analysis. Lastly, we conducted a comparative analysis to investigate the impact of the ESP teaching mode on the reading comprehension skills of English majors. We compared the students’ performance in each type of reading comprehension question and their proficiency in each reading comprehension module before and after the teaching, using independent samples t-tests and chi-square test methods. After the implementation of ESP English teaching, the p-values of students’ performance in reading comprehension main idea questions, factual details questions, inferential judgment questions, and guessing the meaning of words were 0.018, 0.008, 0.041, and 0.004, respectively, with the p-values less than 0.05. This study provides supplemental assessment data for students’ reading comprehension learning, which can have a positive effect on improving their reading levels and increasing their confidence in answering reading comprehension questions.