培养中学生英语阅读兴趣和能力-.doc

Cultivating High School Students’ English Reading Interest and Ability

by

A thesis presented to the School of English Education of
Xi’an International Studies University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts

May 20, 2013

Class:

Advisor:

西安外国语大学
毕 业 论 文 开 题 报 告

姓名

性别

班级

学号

毕业论文题目：
培养中学生英语阅读兴趣和能力
Cultivating High School Students’ English Reading Interest and Ability
任务起止日期： 2012 年11 月23 日 至 2013 年5 月20 日
毕业论文主要内容及参考文献：
阅读是获取信息、扩大知识面的重要手段，并在英语教学中占有非常重要的位置。同时，由于近年来高考试题中的阅读量在不断增加，因此培养学生的阅读兴趣和能力越来越被广大中学师生所重视，中学英语学科课程标准更是将培养学生的阅读能力作为主要的教学目标之一。但是目前，我国中学生英语阅读量严重不足。由于课业负担重，考试负担重，有些学生缺乏阅读兴趣，甚至对阅读怀有恐惧心理，阅读失分率较高；有些学生仅能应付解题，完成一定的课外作业，满足于读课文等有限的语言资料，因而中学英语阅读兴趣和能力的培养可以说是任重道远。本文通过阐述阅读的重要性，分析目前中学生的阅读现状和制约中学生阅读能力的因素，然后论述在英语阅读课堂中的教学技巧和策略，同时提出怎样的教学技巧和策略可以更有效地培养学生的英语阅读兴趣、提高英语阅读能力。希望能为中学的课堂教学研究尽一份自己的绵薄之力。

参考文献：
Bamford, J. and Day, R. R. 1998. Top ten principles for teaching extensive reading. In Bamford, J. and Day, R. R. (Eds.). Extensive Reading Activities for Teaching Language. pp. 7-8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nuttall, C. 2002. Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
Wang, Q. 2006. A Course in English Language Teaching. Beijing: Higher Education Press.

指导教师 (签名)
 年 月 日

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere thanks to all who have helped me through various ways for my writing of this thesis.
Firstly, I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Ms Jing, for her continuous encouragement and expert supervision. Ms Jing gave me many invaluable instructions and helped me much in every stage of my thesis writing. Secondly, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Hai, and teachers at the Department of English, who have instructed and helped me a lot in the past two years.
Moreover, my numerous thanks go to my dear friends and my lovely classmates, who spent much time with me on my thesis. Thanks should also be given to the directors and teachers for my college. What they taught me has paved a way for my writing of the thesis.
Finally, I would like to offer my sincere gratitude to those who spend their precious time in reading this thesis.

培养中学生英语阅读兴趣和能力

摘要：
阅读是获取信息、扩大知识面的重要手段，并在英语教学中占有非常重要的位置。同时，由于近年来高考试题中的阅读量在不断增加，因此培养学生的阅读兴趣和能力越来越被广大中学师生所重视，中学英语学科课程标准更是将培养学生的阅读能力作为主要的教学目标之一。但是目前，我国中学生英语阅读量严重不足。由于课业负担重，考试负担重，有些学生缺乏英语阅读兴趣，甚至对阅读怀有恐惧心理，阅读失分率较高；有些学生仅能应付解题，完成一定的课外作业，满足于读课文等有限的语言资料，因而中学英语阅读兴趣和能力的培养可以说是任重道远。本文通过阐述阅读的重要性，分析目前中学生的阅读现状和制约中学生阅读能力的因素，然后论述在英语阅读课堂中的教学技巧和策略，同时提出怎样的教学技巧和策略可以更有效地培养学生的英语阅读兴趣、提高英语阅读能力。希望能为中学的课堂教学研究尽一份自己的绵薄之力。

关键词：英语阅读；课堂教学；培养兴趣；能力；教学技巧；策略

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

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 10
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 13
5.1.3 Strategy of picture application 13
5.2 Students’ general English reading skills 13
5.2.1 Predicting 14
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 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.
1. Reading in different ways for different purposes
Think about the things you often read: statistics, label on medicine bottle, letter, notice, application form, street map, etc. Why did you read each one? What did you want to get from it? Was it only information? What about the letter from home? And the detective novel? You will find that you had a variety of reasons for reading, and if you ask other people this question, you would find different reasons again.
Now think about the way you read each item. How did the various reasons influence this? Do you read a piece of notice the same way as a poem? How about a street map or a letter? Reading these is very unlike reading a book.
The way you tackled each text was strongly influenced by your purpose in reading. Quickly scanning a page to find someone’s telephone number is very different from perusing a legal document. You probably noticed big differences in the speed you used. Did you also find that in some cases you read silently while in others you read aloud? What were the reasons that led you to articulate what you read? For most of us, reading aloud is uncommon out side the classroom.
2. Reading for meaning
Whatever your reasons for reading (excluding any reading for language learning), it is not very likely that you were interested in the pronunciation of what you read, and even less likely that you were interested in the grammatical structures used. You read because you wanted to get something from the writing. We will call this the message: it might have been facts, but could just as well have been enjoyment, ideas, and feelings (from a family letter, for instance). (Nuttall, C. 2002:3).
3. Why do people read in foreign language?
Perhaps the advantages of knowing a foreign language are clear to your students - better jobs, access to literature or whatever. Reading is usually recognized as a necessary part of these activities. However, if the only foreign language items you have read recently were directly concerned with your teaching, it may be that you and your students too, do not really need to read that language except for classroom purposes.
If this is the case, we must not be surprised if students’ motivation is low. This is a major problem for many language teachers: the motivation of needing to read is powerful. However, you can also motivate students by making their foreign language reading interesting in itself. The language is alive - its users have the same variety of purposes for reading as anybody has when reading their mother tongue - and this fact can be used by teachers to increase motivation.
4. Getting a message from a text
We shall assume, therefore, that reading has one overriding purpose: to get meaning from a text. Other ways of looking at reading will not concern us. Our business is with the ways a reader gets a message from a text. So we will begin by establishing what we mean by a message.

3. The problems of high school students’ English reading

Nowadays, in most senior high school, although reading is regarded as an important subject, the teaching effect is not satisfying. One reason is that some students do not know about the correct reading techniques. Another reason is that some teachers neglect to guide the students how to read and what to read. Teaching does not satisfy the need of learning.
3.1 Incorrect reading techniques
As we all know, reading process is individual. Different readers have different study habits and interests, so they will meet with some problems in reading. High school students have some bad habits in reading.
3.1.1 Reading word by word
Reading word by word is a psychological process. According to psychologists’ study in reading, when people are reading, the eyeballs move with a leap rather than move word by word. Information comes into your brain through some key words connecting to guess sum-up and shape main idea rapidly. Students’ word by word readings not only slow down the speed of reading, but also affect the overall understanding. For example: “pick up”. He picked me up on my way home. In the context of the specific circumstances, the phrase means he gave me a free ride (顺便载你一程). But I just picked English up, it means “just started to learn (刚刚开始学)”. If you take for granted for the literal meaning of “pick up”, which means “take hold of something (把…捡起来)”, it will inevitably lead to the erroneous understanding of the entire sentence. Even if some students can understand the meaning of each word or a phrase. Someone reads with his finger pointing to the words or with his head shaking. Those are all bad habits. You should read phrase by phrase. Do not shake your head, just move your eyeballs. That’s enough. If you want to get more words, information, there must be a proper distance between your eyes and the reading material.
3.1.2 Psychological translation and structure analysis
Many high school students cannot understand the material directly when they are reading, they are inclined to translate while reading in their heart. Through this way they understand the meaning of English sentence, the significance of the paragraph. Some high school students like to analyze the grammar structure of the sentence or pay more attention to individual word, phrase, the se