Research on the Use of Gen AI in Teaching English Reading Comprehension in Senior High School

Abstract

English reading comprehension serves as the core assessment carrier to implement the four dimensions of English subject core competencies, and it has occupied the largest proportion of scores in the new Gaokao English test nationwide. Nevertheless, reading instruction in central and western provinces such as Sichuan remains at the initial exploratory stage, confronted with prominent practical dilemmas including superficial text decoding, single-layered thinking training, and oversimplified evaluation feedback. The rapid iteration of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) provides innovative solutions to the above teaching bottlenecks. Grounded in Interactive Alignment Theory as well as Krashen’s Input Hypothesis and Swain’s Output Hypothesis, against the background of Sichuan’s comprehensive new Gaokao reform, this study selects a Gaokao cross-cultural expository passage about Western campus volunteer culture as a typical case to systematically elaborate three-stage Gen AI reading teaching links: pre-class cultural context awakening and experiential compensation, in-class human-machine collaborative text analysis and logical inquiry, post-class differentiated consolidation and long-term personalized feedback. The research results demonstrate that Gen AI can act as a "cultural awakener", a "logical thinking scaffold", and a "multi-dimensional evaluation reference" throughout the whole reading teaching process. It effectively fills students’ cross-cultural experiential gaps, expands their multi-angle text analysis perspectives, and extends the depth and timeliness of classroom feedback, so as to drive senior high English reading teaching to shift from mechanical vocabulary and grammar drilling to comprehensive core competency cultivation. This research constructs a replicable practical teaching paradigm for intelligent reading instruction in county-level senior high schools of central and western China under the new college entrance examination reform.