Cultivating High School Students’ English Reading Interest and
Ability
Abstract:
Reading has always been regarded as an important method to acquire information and expand knowledge, and it occupies a very important position in the teaching of English. Meanwhile, due to the increasing amount of reading in the College Entrance Examination in recent years, cultivating students? English reading interest and ability has attracted more and more attention from all the high school teachers and students, and the high school English curriculum standards even takes it as the main teaching goal. However, high school students? English reading has been a serious shortfall in our country now. Because of the heavy academic burden and too many exams, some students are lack of interest in reading, even fear to read; some students can only cope with simple reading comprehension questions and complete homework. They are satisfied with reading the limited language materials–textbooks. Therefore, cultivating high school students? English reading interest and ability can say a long way to go. By describing the importance of reading, analyzing the status quo of current high school students? English reading and the factors restricting high school students? English reading abilities, this thesis mainly discusses the strategies and skills in teaching English reading, and proposes which strategies and skills can cultivate high school students? English reading interest and ability effectively. Here I humbly hope that my thesis can make a contribution for the secondary English classroom teaching.
Key words: English reading; classroom teaching; cultivate interest; ability; teaching
skills; strategy
v
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ................................................................................................................ 1 2. The importance of cultivating high school students? English reading interest and ability ............................................................................................................................. 1 3. The problems of high school students? English reading ............................................ 4 3.1 Incorrect reading techniques ................................................................................ 4 3.1.1 Reading word by word ................................................................................ 4 3.1.2 Psychological translation and structure analysis......................................... 5 3.1.3 Reread the sentence from bottom to up ...................................................... 5 3.1.4 Referring too much to dictionary ................................................................ 5 3.2 Inadequate guidance from the teacher ................................................................. 6 4. Principles and models for teaching reading ............................................................... 8 4.1 Principles.............................................................................................................. 8 4.2 Bottom-up model ................................................................................................. 9 4.3 Top-down model .................................................................................................. 9 4.4 Interactive model ............................................................................................... 10 5. The ways to cultivate high school students? English reading interest and ability ... 11 5.1 Teachers? instructive strategies .......................................................................... 11 5.1.1 Strategy of cooperation ............................................................................. 11 5.1.2 Strategy of role exchange .......................................................................... 12 5.1.3 Strategy of picture application .................................................................. 13 5.2 Students? general English reading skills ............................................................ 13 5.2.1 Predicting .................................................................................................. 13 5.2.2 Skimming .................................................................................................. 15 5.2.3 Scanning .................................................................................................... 15 5.2.4 Guessing skill ............................................................................................ 16 6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 17 References .................................................................................................................... 19
vi
1. Introduction
English reading has always been considered as one of the most important parts of English learning. Actually, reading is a process of mentally interpreting written symbols. It involves a series of factors that a reader brings to a text. These factors include reading ability to monitor their own comprehension, decode unknown words and fix-up strategies. Reading ability includes understanding ability and reading speed. Understanding consists of the understanding of the surface structure and the deep meaning that author expresses. Whether reading ability is good or not depends on reading speed as well as understanding level. Reading speed and reading comprehension are two elements that can not be separated. Poor reading comprehension surely results in slowdown reading speed. Neglect of reading speed must have bad effect on reading comprehension.
As reading is a part of academic literacy, English teachers usually have high expectations of a student?s ability to cope with the demand of reading in English. Most students wish to read more books. Reading is a way for students to possess more knowledge and pass many kinds of examinations. However, it is also an activity that many students don?t like very much. To succeed at schools, students need to possess a range of strategies and skills to support self-directed learning. Traditionally, many of these strategies and skills, some of which are highly generic, are not explicitly taught to students in the expectation that students either already have these skills, or will naturally acquire and develop these skills in their course of study. In order to improve the students? ability we may have to answer the follow questions: what are the English reading habits of students? Which strategies and skills we should use in English reading?
2. The importance of cultivating high school students’ English
1
reading interest and ability
As reading is very much a part of our daily life, we hardly consider the processes involved and we rarely ask the question: ?what is reading?? According to Day and Bamford (1998:12), ?reading is the construction of meaning from a printed or written message.? In other words, reading comprehension involves extracting the relevant information from the text as efficiently as possible, connecting the information from the written message with one?s own knowledge to arrive at an understanding. Reading is a silent and individual activity since the writer?s intention was for the text to be read rather than heard. There are two broad levels in the act of reading: i) a recognition task of perceiving visual signals from the printed page through the eyes; ii) a cognitive task of interpreting the visual information, relating the received information with the reader?s own general knowledge, and reconstructing the meaning that the writer had meant to convey.
Reading has always been regarded as an important method to acquire information and expand knowledge, and it occupies a very important position in the teaching of English. In recent years, reading comprehension takes up more than 30% in the college entrance examination paper, and the high school English curriculum standards even takes it as the main teaching goal. This further requires that we must pay attention to cultivate students? reading comprehension ability in English teaching. However, high school students? English reading has been a serious shortfall in our country now. Because of the heavy academic burden and too many exams, some students are lack of interest in reading, even fear to read; some students can only cope with simple reading comprehension questions and complete homework. They are satisfied with reading the limited language materials–textbooks. A lot of readings appear in an examination. But all these readings must be done in limited time. So students are asked to read them correctly and with a certain speed. To do this, they should change their bad reading habit and raise their reading efficiency. Therefore, cultivating high school students? English reading interest and ability can say a long way to go.
2