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Abstract: This paper analyses the college students’ reading problems and points out the importance of reading, then gives some suggestions on how to improve the college students’ reading ability It is expected that with some effective ways, the reader can help students read actively and grow into effective and
Key words: reading comprehension ability; background knowledge; encourage; improve.
Improving students’ reading ability has always been a focus in College English teaching, for most Chinese people obtain information conveyed in English this way. Yet years of efforts he produced little much- desired results. Widdowson (1983) discovered a text does not actually provide all the information for comprehension. Anderson & Pearson (1984) almost agree, arguing written symbols on the page are only indications for the readers to reconstruct the meaning of the text.
Reading is useful for other purposes too: any exposure to English is a good thing for language students. At the very least, some of the language sticks in their minds as part of the process of language acquisition, and, if the reading text is especially interesting and engaging, acquisition is likely to be even more succesul.
Reading is regarded as the most efficient means to obtain scientific and technological information in this age of knowledge explosion, reading comprehension is one of the aspects indispensable to learning English as a foreign language, especially our College English Syllabus. Consequently, reading efficiency has turned a serious problem to be discussed.
“Psycholinguistics is usually divided into the study of language acquisition, language production (speaking and writing) and language understanding (listening and reading).” (Brown,1995:99). “Psycholinguistics also divided the process of language understanding into three main groups: word-level process, syntactic process, and message-level process.” (Brown 1995:99-100). It is obvious that linguistic level processes constitute the main foundation of understanding. On the other hand, reading comprehension also involves more than linguistic decoding.
1. Some learners studying English as a foreign language might think that reading comprehension is simply a linguistic word-decoding progress, or to identify words. Actually, there is a gap between knowing what a sentence mean and understanding all that the author intends to communicate on a given occasion. According to some psycholinguistic analysis of r
2. They he difficulties in understanding the text as a whole and do not know how to infer something from what they read. The subjective questions like “what is the author’s attitude? How has the author organized his essay?” are difficult for them to answer.
3. They do not know what they should know or learn from the reading and from the reading material.
4. They can only read word by word, with lips keeping moving while reading silently.
5. Teachers analyze long sentence structures and then lee time for the students to do exercises on the structures, and the students stumble on unfamiliar words and are used to consulting every new word in the dictionary.
4 Suggestions On Raising Students’ Reading Ability
“Comprehension is the essence of reading; indeed it is the only purpose for reading” (Richek et al. , 1996:154). According to my former experience of teaching English, I felt that so long as my students grasped the meaning of each word, each sentence, and each text passage, they would he no difficulty in comprehending the whole text. Therefore, in my class I focused primarily on the teaching of vocabulary and grammar in the hope that this might help students improve reading comprehension. However, the result was often, although not always, disappointing.In order to raise the students’ reading ability, let them read the passages efficiently and effectively, I do as follows:
4.1 Improving Students’ Background Knowledge And Awareness
The term “background knowledge” is sometimes referred to as prior knowledge”, but also as “word k
4.2Paying Attention To Semantic Broadening
Some words lose their original senses when used in specific context. The learners must figure out the understatement when reading between the lines. For examples, “aunt” and “holiday”, the older meaning of “aunt” was father’s sister, but its modern referent can also be mother’s sister. The word “holiday” was originally used to mean a day of religious significance because it was a “holy day”. Today everyone enjoys a holiday, whether he or she is religious or not.
4.4Encouraging Students To Say Out Their Ideas About The Text
Students need a lot of encouragement before they venture to talk about their thoughts into the text. They are surprised to see their images differed. This is natural, for each of them has different life experience and different standards for beauty. They should be encouraged to say out their ideas about the text.
Reading for detailed comprehension, whether looking for detailed information o
4.7 Students Should Be Encouraged To Respond To The Content Of a Reading Text, Not Just To The Language
It is important to studying reading texts for the way they uselanguage, the number of paragraphs they contain and how many times they use relative clauses, but the meaning, the message of the text, is just as important and we must give students a chance to respond to that message in some way. It is especially important that they should be allowed to express their feelings about the topic-thus provoking personal engagement with it and the language.
4.8 Students He To Match Topic Sentences With The Paragraphs They Come From.
It is easier for students to learn to consider the passage as a whole. It is, however, too early to look at the whole passage. The paragraph is shorter and therefore easier for students to grasp than a whole passage. So at this step, more paragraphs are suggested to be taken up for practicing the finding out of the topic sentences.!
5Conclusion
All in all, how to improve our students’ competence in reading comprehension in a very close way to our own classroom teaching English as a foreign language, not far away from our own teaching demand. Since our students’ mother tongue is Chinese but not English, we he every reason to strengthen our own research on our own problems with the help of the West linguistic theories and teaching experience. to train effective readers, we should encourage our students to activate background knowledge and form a conversation with the writer so that they can read more and more quickly with better comprehension. Thus reading becomes more meaningful and interesting to them.
References
1. Liu Runqing & Hu Zhuanglin. 2000. Studies in English Language Teaching in China. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press2. Zhang Qisi, Guo Xiaohong & Guo Jinhui. 2002. College English Step-up Reading. Shenyang: Liaoning People’s Publishing House
3. Devine & Thomas G. 1986. Teaching Reading Comprehension: From Theory to Practice. London: Allan and Bacon
4. Johnson, P. 1982. “Effects on reading comprehension of building background knowledge”, TESOL Quarterly, 16: 503-516
5. Aebersold, Jo a. & Mary L. Field. 1997. From reader to Reading Teacher: Issues and Strategies for Second Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
6. He Zhaoxiong & Mei Deming. 1998. Modern Linguistics. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press
7. Harmer, J.2000. How to Teach English . Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press
8. Widdowson, H. G. 1984
9. Smith, F. 1978. Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
10. Gao Jili. 2002. Teaching English in China .Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press
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independent readers. How much readers understand a text depends on how much they bring into it, to be efficient readers, students can use their background knowledge of the reading text and so on.Key words: reading comprehension ability; background knowledge; encourage; improve.
1 Introduction
“Comprehension is the essence of reading; indeed it is the only purpose for reading” (Richek et al. , 1996:154). Most English reading teachers he attributed their students’ poor reading comprehension to linguistic deficiencies. Consequently poor readers are encouraged to expand their vocabularies and to gain greater control over complex syntactic structures so long as to improve reading comprehension.Improving students’ reading ability has always been a focus in College English teaching, for most Chinese people obtain information conveyed in English this way. Yet years of efforts he produced little much- desired results. Widdowson (1983) discovered a text does not actually provide all the information for comprehension. Anderson & Pearson (1984) almost agree, arguing written symbols on the page are only indications for the readers to reconstruct the meaning of the text.
2 The Importance Of Teaching Reading
There are many reasons why getting students to read English texts is an important part of the teacher’s job. In the first place, many of them want to be read texts in English either for their careers, for study purposes or simply for pleasure. Anything we can do to make reading easier for them must be a good idea.Reading is useful for other purposes too: any exposure to English is a good thing for language students. At the very least, some of the language sticks in their minds as part of the process of language acquisition, and, if the reading text is especially interesting and engaging, acquisition is likely to be even more succesul.
Reading is regarded as the most efficient means to obtain scientific and technological information in this age of knowledge explosion, reading comprehension is one of the aspects indispensable to learning English as a foreign language, especially our College English Syllabus. Consequently, reading efficiency has turned a serious problem to be discussed.
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If reading is effective and efficient, it should be of both high speed and high accuracy. Then, what are the proper standards for reading efficiency?“Psycholinguistics is usually divided into the study of language acquisition, language production (speaking and writing) and language understanding (listening and reading).” (Brown,1995:99). “Psycholinguistics also divided the process of language understanding into three main groups: word-level process, syntactic process, and message-level process.” (Brown 1995:99-100). It is obvious that linguistic level processes constitute the main foundation of understanding. On the other hand, reading comprehension also involves more than linguistic decoding.
1. Some learners studying English as a foreign language might think that reading comprehension is simply a linguistic word-decoding progress, or to identify words. Actually, there is a gap between knowing what a sentence mean and understanding all that the author intends to communicate on a given occasion. According to some psycholinguistic analysis of r
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eading process, “what was once thought to be a one-way flow of information to the brain is known to be interactive , or two-way communication between the reader’s mind and the information printed”. (Devine 1985:177). “No longer can reading in a second language be viewed as a passive progress. Nor is reading simply an active progress; rather; efficient & effective reading requires a true interaction between reader and the text.” (Devine 1985:2). In fact, it is a multifaceted and complex progress, involving interdisciplinary knowledge in pragmatics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, semantics, as well as many subskills, apart from pure linguistics.2. They he difficulties in understanding the text as a whole and do not know how to infer something from what they read. The subjective questions like “what is the author’s attitude? How has the author organized his essay?” are difficult for them to answer.
3. They do not know what they should know or learn from the reading and from the reading material.
4. They can only read word by word, with lips keeping moving while reading silently.
5. Teachers analyze long sentence structures and then lee time for the students to do exercises on the structures, and the students stumble on unfamiliar words and are used to consulting every new word in the dictionary.
4 Suggestions On Raising Students’ Reading Ability
“Comprehension is the essence of reading; indeed it is the only purpose for reading” (Richek et al. , 1996:154). According to my former experience of teaching English, I felt that so long as my students grasped the meaning of each word, each sentence, and each text passage, they would he no difficulty in comprehending the whole text. Therefore, in my class I focused primarily on the teaching of vocabulary and grammar in the hope that this might help students improve reading comprehension. However, the result was often, although not always, disappointing.In order to raise the students’ reading ability, let them read the passages efficiently and effectively, I do as follows:
4.1 Improving Students’ Background Knowledge And Awareness
The term “background knowledge” is sometimes referred to as prior knowledge”, but also as “word k
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nowledge, or “pre-reading knowledge” (Devine, 1986:25). It is all the information and ideas, all the perceptions and concepts, as well as the intellectual residues of emotional expressions, held in long-term memory by readers.” ( Heilman et al. 1986). The importance of background information in language comprehension has been formalized as schema theory (Carrell, 1983). According to the theory, comprehending a text is an interactive progress between the students’ background knowledge and the text. So, if the students he specific background knowledge about the passage before reading it they will comprehend it better. When students’ background knowledge of a topic increases, their comprehension also improves. (Tierney & Pearson, 1987:179).4.2Paying Attention To Semantic Broadening
Some words lose their original senses when used in specific context. The learners must figure out the understatement when reading between the lines. For examples, “aunt” and “holiday”, the older meaning of “aunt” was father’s sister, but its modern referent can also be mother’s sister. The word “holiday” was originally used to mean a day of religious significance because it was a “holy day”. Today everyone enjoys a holiday, whether he or she is religious or not.
4.3Paying Attention To Semantic Shift
Semantic shift is a process of semantic change in which a word loses its former meaning and acquires a new, sometimes related, meaning. An example of semantic shift is the word “silly”. Quite surprisingly, a “silly” person was a happy person in Old English, and a native person in Middle English, but has become a foolish person in Modern English.4.4Encouraging Students To Say Out Their Ideas About The Text
Students need a lot of encouragement before they venture to talk about their thoughts into the text. They are surprised to see their images differed. This is natural, for each of them has different life experience and different standards for beauty. They should be encouraged to say out their ideas about the text.
4.5Specific Way Of Reading Practice
Specific scientific in-class training for reading efficiency is to be scheduled rather than just give techniques and test questions and let them do it at random, for there are rarely such things as natural increasing efficiency in reading unless there is the real situation or pressure besides motivation. A. in an effort to increase both students’ confidence and their reading ability, we should gradually increase reading-quantity and difficulty in limited time for daily practice rather than set only one fixed standard time and level for each band. B. systematically introduce reading attack skills, with emphasis on activating the reader’s cognitive schemata, stimulating active reading by providing sufficient corresponding exercises for the reader to grow into habitual practice. C. We may as well design some situational reading classes, with the help of multimedia courseware, to make the training more exciting and enjoyable, just as we do for most oral practice.4.6Scanning Or Skimming The Text
Students need to be able to scan the text for particular bits of information they are searching for. They also need to be able to skim the text-as if they were casting their eyes over its surface-to get general idea of what is about. Just as with scanning, if they try to gather all the details at this stage, they will get bogged down and may not be able to get the general idea because they are concentrating too hard on specifics.Reading for detailed comprehension, whether looking for detailed information o
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r language, must be seen by students as something very different from the reading skills above. When looking for details, we expect students to concentrate on the minute of what they are reading.4.7 Students Should Be Encouraged To Respond To The Content Of a Reading Text, Not Just To The Language
It is important to studying reading texts for the way they uselanguage, the number of paragraphs they contain and how many times they use relative clauses, but the meaning, the message of the text, is just as important and we must give students a chance to respond to that message in some way. It is especially important that they should be allowed to express their feelings about the topic-thus provoking personal engagement with it and the language.
4.8 Students He To Match Topic Sentences With The Paragraphs They Come From.
It is easier for students to learn to consider the passage as a whole. It is, however, too early to look at the whole passage. The paragraph is shorter and therefore easier for students to grasp than a whole passage. So at this step, more paragraphs are suggested to be taken up for practicing the finding out of the topic sentences.!
5Conclusion
All in all, how to improve our students’ competence in reading comprehension in a very close way to our own classroom teaching English as a foreign language, not far away from our own teaching demand. Since our students’ mother tongue is Chinese but not English, we he every reason to strengthen our own research on our own problems with the help of the West linguistic theories and teaching experience. to train effective readers, we should encourage our students to activate background knowledge and form a conversation with the writer so that they can read more and more quickly with better comprehension. Thus reading becomes more meaningful and interesting to them.
References
1. Liu Runqing & Hu Zhuanglin. 2000. Studies in English Language Teaching in China. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press2. Zhang Qisi, Guo Xiaohong & Guo Jinhui. 2002. College English Step-up Reading. Shenyang: Liaoning People’s Publishing House
3. Devine & Thomas G. 1986. Teaching Reading Comprehension: From Theory to Practice. London: Allan and Bacon
4. Johnson, P. 1982. “Effects on reading comprehension of building background knowledge”, TESOL Quarterly, 16: 503-516
5. Aebersold, Jo a. & Mary L. Field. 1997. From reader to Reading Teacher: Issues and Strategies for Second Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
6. He Zhaoxiong & Mei Deming. 1998. Modern Linguistics. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press
7. Harmer, J.2000. How to Teach English . Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press
8. Widdowson, H. G. 1984
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. “Reading and Communication” in Alderson. C. & Urquhart, A.H.(eds) Reading In Foreign Language. London: Longman9. Smith, F. 1978. Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
10. Gao Jili. 2002. Teaching English in China .Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press