提高中学生的英语阅读能力

Introduction
 “ The most basic educational skill is reading. The most basic obligation of any school is to teach reading”--- President George W. Bush. Reading is an important element in English learning. However, many students are not good at it. They often get half the result with twice the effort. Now let us discuss it and explore the ways of improving reading skills. I hope I can solve the problems that have trouble me for some time through the action research so that I can apply my knowledge and theory into practice.

Reading is one of the basic abilities in learning English. Without reading abilities, the society couldn’t make progress. Nowadays, China is in the process of economic exchanges and globalization. These contribute to the development of global economy, politics, culture, society, science and technology. In such a macro-background, people pay more and more attention to English learning and have higer and higer requirements of reading cmprehension. The aim of English teaching in junior middle school is to develop the students’ ability for reading professional and original books. Therefore, besides listening, writing, translating and other aspects of English abilities, the teachers should also focus on developing students’ abilities in reading comprehension. Such kind of abilities means that the individuals could understand the meaning that the teacher has expressed. And it is also a complicated thinking activity in the core of understanding. “Current models of the reading process focus on the interactive relation of reader and text. From this perspective, reading is understood to be a complex cognitive process in which reader and text interact to (re)creat meaningful discourse.” Reading is valued not only as an educational tool, but as a source of enjoyment.

Abstract

 The paper aims at how to improve the students’ English reading abilities in the junior middle school. Reading is one of the basic abilities in learning English. It is found that there are some obstacles of the students in the junior middle school on improving their abilities in reading comprehension in the process of reading. First, the paper discusses the factors for different purposes and the other is that students read only for meanings of the text. Second, combining with the two factors, psychological mechanism and cognitive process in English reading, it analyzes the factors of hindering the improvement of students’ reading abilities, that is, teachers’ teaching methods and students’ characteristics. Then, according to these factors, the paper gives solutions to getting rid of the obstacles in English reading, such as emphasizing on the cultural background knowledge, the influence of discourse and the acquisition of lexicon. Finally, it mentions that teachers should pay attention to the training of reading skills in English teaching to help students to master reading skills and improve their reading abilities.

[key words]: reading interest; reading materials; the teaching methods; reading strategies

提高中学生的英语阅读能力
何丽珍
【摘要】
 本文旨在如何提高中学生的英语阅读能力。阅读是学习英语的一项基本能力。学生在阅读过程中存在一些障碍，阻碍了他们英语阅读能力的提高。针对这一问题，本文首先探讨了提高中学生阅读能力的两个因素：一方面，学生处于不同的目的而采用不同的方式进行阅读；另一方面，学生在进行阅读时能够理解文章的意思；文章结合着两方面的原因和阅读的心理机制以及认知过程，分析了阻碍中学生英语阅读能力提高的因素：教师的教学方法和学生自身的特点；接着根据这些因素，文章提出了克服这些障碍的解决方法：重视文化背景知识的渊源，重视语篇的影响，重视词汇的习得等方法；最后文章提到教师在教学过程中应该注意训练、指导学生掌握阅读技巧，从而是此案提高其英语阅读能力的目标。

【关键词】：阅读兴趣；阅读材料；阅读教学法；阅读策略

Contents

On developing English reading skills in Middle Schools
The connotation of English reading
1.1 The concept of English reading
 English reading is an important part in English teaching. It is also an important aspect of the students to use English. Reading is a complex psychological and mental activity. It is a cognitive process including constantly assumption, confirmed, imagination and reasoning. There are two stages in this process. They are recognition and definition. Recognition looks for and determines the meaning of characters, syntax structure and the relationship between the statements; definition is to use the theme, the context of the text to explain the information, and recover the meaning of the text. Comprehensive ability is the most important in reading. Reading comprehension is the ability to deal with the useful information. It is not the ability to know each word in the article, but the ability beyond the sentence.
 1.1.1Different opinions on English reading
 1.1.2My opinion on English reading
 1.2 The purpose of the English reading
 Generally speaking, there are two purposes of reading. One is for pleasure, the other is to get information, such as English knowledge, the cultural background knowledge of the target language and news, etc. the purposes of the reading teaching in middle school, in addition to for pleasure and recreation, what’s more, is to train the reading skills and get the new knowledge, for 95% of the new knowledge get from the books. It is too difficult to get new knowledge for lacking of certain reading comprehension. It is found that listening and speaking take up 75% of the human communication activities and reading and writing take up 25% of those. (JiaGuanJie "foreign language education psychology of guangxi education press, 1994), P114) The data only shows that listening and speaking used more frequently than reading and writing, but it can’t suggest that reading and writing are less important than listening and speaking. English teaching in Primary and Middle school emphasized "emphasis on reading," and regarded "to improve their reading abilities" as the first goal clearly, which accorded with China's national conditions.
   1.2.1 For pleasure
   1.2.2 Getting information
1.3The types of English reading
 According to the different standards, reading can be divided into different types. According to whether you speak, it can be divided into reading aloud and silent reading. Reading aloud is to read loudly, it requires the reader to utter every syllable in every word while silent reading requires no utterances at all and thus it is silent. Because of the differences in the manner of reading , the speed varies. According to the reading methods and requirements, it can be divided into intensive reading and extensive reading. Intensive reading is also called analytical reading because it focus on not only language content, but also language form. It can keep students master the basis language knowledge by reasoning and gain the ability of using language through the explanation and training of vocabulary and grammar. Extensive reading is also called comprehensive reading, it focus on getting more information accurately in unit of time, and improving the reading skills. Its purpose is to engage in a large of language materials, enrich vocabularies enlarge scope of knowledge and improve the reading ability. According to the purposes of reading, it can be divided into study reading and communicative reading. 周流溪 《中国中学英语教育百科全书》 东北大学出版社  1995年版，P261）study reading is for the common study while the communicative reading is getting the knowledge offered by others through reading. It regarded reading materials as the source of needed information. It focus on language content, not the language form. Its purpose is to learn the main idea of material. According to the reading skills, it can be divided into skimming reading and scanning reading. Skimming reading means reading quickly to get the gist, i.e. the main idea of the text. There are many situations where we do skimming. For example, when we read newspapers, we usually read very fast to get the main information and only spent more time on those items that are more important. Scanning reading means to read to locate specific information. The key point in scanning is that the reader has something in his mind and he should ignore the irrelevant parts when reading. On a day-to-day basis, we scan figures, train schedules, time-tables, phone numbers, news headlines, dictionaries,etc. so it is useful to use these materials for practice in the classroom. Questions for a scanning activity are often about specific information, such as: find Mr.Smith’s phone number. How many people were injured in the explosion?
1.3.1The key types of English reading in Middle Schools
1.3.2Thought
The requirements of the syllabus in Junior School
The purpose of the study
2.1.1 The importance of the study
The influence factors on Junior English reading
The features of the junior English reading materials
     3.1.1 The reading strategies on these features
Junior high school students' reading characteristics
  3.2.1 The bad reading habits of the Junior high school students
Other factors (such as individual difference)
  3.3.1 Individual difference
The methods on improving English reading skills in Middle Schools
The suggestions focus on the features on English reading materials in Middle Schools
4.1.1 The universal methods
To enhance the English reading skills by extracurricular reading materials
 4.2.1 The types of the extracurricular reading materials
       4.2.1.1 The benefit of the extracurricular reading materials
       4.2.1.2 The extracurricular reading materials suited for Junior students
The students’ interest
4.3.1 The students’ psychological characteristics
The social cultures and the background knowledge
The social cultures
The background knowledge
Some kinds of common and easy reading ways
4.5.1 Some kinds of common reading ways
  4.5.1.1 Suitable students
4.5.2 Some kinds of effective reading ways
  4.5.2.1 Suitable students
5. How to make an English reading class more effective
  5.1 The role of teachers
 As teachers of English, they need to be aware of the difficulties in developing reading skills with their students and try to work out effective strategies to help students overcome the obstacles so that good reading habits and effective reading strategies are developed properly to enable them to become proficient readers in a foreign language.
 An important implication for the teaching of reading to ESL/EFL learners is that instead of just using textbooks to teach the words and structures to the students, the teacher should try to introduce an extensive reading scheme whenever possible to encourage learners to read more after class. However, the materials chosen must be at the right level and a degree of monitoring should be available to keep the motivation high so that atudents can feel a sense of achievement by sharing their reading experiences with others. Students can also be encouraged to keep a vocabulary notebooks, to use a dictionary whenever necessary and to write a simple book report for a class record, etc. This can be an important step to assist students to become autonomous learners (Hedge, 2000)
  5.2 Reading materials
  5.3 Priciples and models for teaching reading
When teaching reading, great care should be taken regarding how we should teach, which involes materials selection, task design, student motivation and skills development. Below are some priciples for teaching reading.
The selected texts and attached tasks should be accessible to the students. Inaccessible texts and tasks do not help improve students’ reading skills but cause frustration.
Tasks should be clearly given in advance. Preferably, tasks should motivate students.
Tasks should be designed to encourage selective and intelligent reading for the main meaning rather than test the students’ understanding of trivial details.
Tasks should help develop students’ reading skills rather than test their reading comprehension. If you always ask students to read passages then answer multiple choice questions, you are actually testing them not developing their reading skills.
The teacher should help students not merely to cope with one particular text in class but to develop their reading strategies and reading ability in general so that they are able to apply the strategies or skills learned in class to tackle other texts they encounter outside class or in the future.
The teacher should provide enough guidance and assistance at the beginning to help students read and develop reading strategies but gradually withdraw his/her guidance as students progress so that they eventually become independent readers.
Bottom-up model
The way one teaches reading always reflects the way one understands reading and the reading process. Some teachers teach reading by introducing new vocabulary and structures first and then going over the text sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph with the students. This is then followed by questions and answers to check comprehension. Also a lot of time is spent on having students read aloud the text. This way of teaching reflects the belief that reading comprehension is based on the mastery of the new words and new structures as well as a lot of reading aloud practice. It basically follows a linear process from the recognition of letters to words, to phrases, to sentences, to paragraphs, and then to the meaning of the whole text. This way of teaching is known to follow a bottom-up model.
Top-down model
However, a different view believes that one’s background knowledge plays a more important role than new words and new structures in reading comprehension. For example, we all have experiences of reading that does not contain any new words or new structures, but we still fail to understand its overall meaning. In other cases, we may read an article which contains quite a number of new words as well as difficult structures with reasonable understanding. This is because we have made use of our knowledge about the topic to assist our comprehension. Therefore, it is believed that in teaching reading, the teacher should teach the background knowledge first so that students equipped with such knowledge will be able to guess meaning from the printed page. This process of reading is said to follow the top-down model. Just as Goodman(1967) once said reading is ‘a psycholinguistic guessing game.”
Interactive model
The current theory views reading as an interactive process. That is to say, the brain receives visual information and at the same time, interprets or reconstructs the meaning the writer had in mind when he wrote the text. This process does not only involve the printed page but also the reader’s knowledge of the language in general, of the world, and of the text types. During the process of reading, all these factors interact with each other and compensate for each other. Therefore, a proficient reader should have good langugage skills: automatic recognition of words and phrases, understanding sentence structures, building a discourse structure, etc. Then he integrates this decoding process with what he/she already knows about the topic. One’s general knowledge about the world and about text types are known as schemas or schemata, which has been described as the “cognitive constructs which allow for the organisation of information in our longterm memory” (Widdowson,1983). During the reading process, our mind by interacting with the printed page-----its words, phrases, sentences, as well as the context it provides can be stimulated and a proper schema will be activated to allow us to relate the incoming information to already know information. If we do not have the type of necessary schma for a particular reading text, let’s say cultural specific knowledge, we may have to resort heavily to other knowledge which is available, such as our linguistic knowledgeand text type knowledge to aid our comprehwnsion. Similarly, when we do not have the necessary linguistic knowledge, we will have to resort to our world knowledge to help ease the difficulties in comprehension and we believe a good linguistic basis is the fundamental as far as foreign language reading is concerned.