On Teaching of Reading in Senior High School1.doc

高中英语阅读教学方法的探讨on teaching of reading in senior high schoolcontentsabstract.1key words.1i.introduction.21.1 why the paper was written? .21.2 whats reading?.21.3 the role of reading.31.4 why do the people read? .31.4.1 reading for information.31.4.2 reading for pleasure.4ii.the problems in present teaching of reading .42.1 the teachers problems.42.1.1 the traditional teaching procedures.42.1.2 ignorance to teach the culture of foreign countries.42.2 lack of flexibility.62.3 why the students fail to understand the texts ?.6iii. the methods of reading teaching in senior high school .63.1 pre-reading activities . 63.1.1 predicting .73.1.2 questioning . .83.1.3 discussing .83.1.4 mapping .83.1.5 skimming.93.2 while-reading activities .93.3 post-reading activities .12iv. implementation .134.1 pre-reading activities . .134.2 while-reading activities .134.3 post-reading activities . 13v. conclusion.14references.14摘要: 阅读是人们获得知识和信息的重要途径。阅读教学的目的，是使学生学习基本阅读方法，更好地了解英语国家的文化，时事等。由于英语和汉语的差异甚大，这就给中国学生的英语阅读增加了不少困难。在这种情景下就需要英语教师采取更有效的教学模式和教学途径，使学生能熟练的掌握英语阅读方法并能够轻松地阅读英语杂志，报刊等。传统的三步英语阅读教学 “教新单词讲语法做练习” 的模式和教学途径和现行的三步英语阅读教学 “阅读前阅读中阅读后” 模式和教学途径有其优点但也有其不足，有待英语教师去探索和创新。本文分析了影响英语阅读速度和效度的主要因素,介绍了英语阅读教学的方法和技巧,指出只有用正确的方法不断训练,才能收到事半功倍的效果。关键词：阅读；阅读教学；阅读技巧；阅读方法；阅读习惯abstract: reading is the most important way for people to get information. the main goal of our reading courses is to give students a working knowledge of english so that they can know the culture and customs of english-speaking countries. there are a lot of differences between english and chinese, which give a lot of troubles to students. so as teachers we must take a lot of activities to help the students to learn the skills of english reading, including the better mode of teaching and the better approaches of teaching grammar so that the students can use these skills to read in the target language easily. nowadays the teaching modes and there are weaknesses in the approaches that need teachers to create a more fair way to teach reading. the paper analyses the factors which affect the reading speed and efficiency, introduces the methods and skills of english reading teaching, and points that only practice in correct methods can lead to success. key words: reading; reading teaching; reading skills; reading methods;reading habitsi. introduction1.1 why this paper was written?as we all know, there are four skills in english learning, and they cant be separated from each other. many teachers say that: first listening and speaking, then reading and writing. this is exactly right. but it is fit for the beginners. for a senior high school student, reading is the most important task. because before the students have new lessons, the teachers often ask students to read the text first, explain the grammar points next, and then they have the students do a lot of reading comprehension exercises. in the teaching practice, some students are found very weak in reading. some of them even think that reading is a boring and monotonous task. they do not understand some sentences even the main ideas though they know all of the words. furthermore, most of the students study very hard, but they are still poor in reading comprehension.the paper aims at how to enhance the students interest in learning english and how to improve students reading ability in an effective way. how to improve the students reading ability effectively is a core problem that english teachers have paid close attention to for recent years. in most school, lots of teachers use the old traditional method“reading new words teaching grammardoing exercises.” as a result, they spend much time on teaching language points instead of training students ability of using language, which is the main purpose for the students to learn.in order to help students to foster good reading habits and understand the texts better, being teachers, we should help our students to learn a lot of reading skills. but this was not satisfactory in the present english language reading teaching. that is the main reason why the paper was written.1.2 what is reading?reading is not just the ability to recognize words, the reader also needs to make sense of what he reads. articulating words and pronouncing them correctly can not called reading. reading is an active process, during which the reader tries to understand the meaning of a given text, and reading is a kind of important ability to the students, it is one of the cores in english teaching.reading is a process of communication between the writer and the reader. for the writer, he wants to communicate by a pen, and has a communicative purpose. writers write things because they want to convey what they want to say to the readers, or they want to attract their readers, or they simply want to give the readers some information. to complete the communicative purposes, the writer may turn to his knowledge about language for help, and choose the language he thinks appropriate for his purposes and put his ideas into code for his readers to decode. so reading can also be regarded as a process of encoding and decoding (hu zhuanglin, 2004). while for the reader, he wants to read because there is an information gap between the writer and the reader. he is interested in what is being written for the communicative purpose and he wants to know what information the writer is conveying. thus readers must prepare themselves to process the forms of language that the writer uses to know exactly what is being written. therefore reading involves the recognition of letters, words, phrases and clauses, and it can be considered as a simpler process than comprehension. comprehension is a process of negotiating understanding between the reader and the writer. the reader receives information from the writer through the words, sentences, paragraphs, and tries to understand the inner feeling of the writer.1.3 the role of readingthe role of reading is controversial in language pedagogy. different elt practitioners have different views on it. do we need to study reading to learn a language? the answer is yes, as reading can help you to understand a language more quickly and more efficiently. its important to think of reading as something that can help you, like a friend. when you understand the background of a text, you can understand many things by yourself without having to ask a teacher or look in a book. through an observation, it shows poor reading habits can reduce other english skills, such as speaking, listening, writing and translating. that is to say, the level of reading can improve the students level in speaking and writing. so it is useful to assist english teachers of senior high school level to accelerate the efficiency of integrating english reading.1.4 why do people read?there are many reasons for our reading, such as: people want to get information, reading for pleasure, solve problems, pass examinations, etc. but the most important and ordinary are the first two.1.4.1 reading for informationas we all know, reading is the most important way to get information. reading teaching is very important, especially in the senior high school, because the senior high school students are easy to shape, that is to say, they can improve their reading skills easily. but they can also develop a lot of bad reading habits, such as lip-moving, head-moving, finger-pointing, and over dependence on the dictionaries. however, the teachers should help the students to get away from these bad reading habits.1.4.2 reading for pleasuregetting information is the most important but not the only purpose of reading. sometimes we read for pleasure, i.e., when we read literary works. and we should encourage the students to read for pleasure.ii. the problems in present teaching of readingin senior high schools, teachers think that english reading teaching is just to teach vocabulary and grammar. so, english teaching only lays stress on analyzing grammar structures and explaining lots of language knowledge, which give students many difficulties in learning english to a certain extent. during the teaching practicing, a situation was found that many students lost their interest in english reading, although most of them worked very hard, the causes can be summed from the following aspects: 2.1 the teachers problems:2.1.1 the traditional teaching procedures:in the traditional english teaching procedure, the class was teacher-centered. teachers only drew the passive learners interest in pronouncing the new words and phrases, explaining the grammar points and demonstrating the useful expressions or idioms by example sentences, the traditional english classes were teachers not the students. teachers wanted their students to make variety of sentences according to the given examples, but students often failed to do so. this is so called “teach”, which took the place of students creative discovery. meanwhile, they neglected the main idea of the passages as well as the authors thought which he /she wanted to express, even the inferred meaning between lines. teachers only stress on the presentation of knowledge and explanation of grammar instead of enhancing the students interest, this influenced the result of reading terribly. 2.1.2 ignorance to teach the culture of foreign countries any country or nation has their own unique traditional culture including values, modes of thinking, moral rules, customs, life style, etc, which forms the difference between different nations on culture. language is the carrier of culture, and culture is the context of language. just as a soviet linguist says, “no language can exist unless it is stepped in the context of culture; and no culture can exist which does not have at its corner the structure of natural language”, which all show that culture is the soul of language and language is the support of culture, no language can exist without culture. learning a language, in fact, is inseparable from learning its culture (deng yanchang & liu runqing, 1989). therefore, in english teaching, teachers not only make students master the language, but also make them learn its unique culture, and teachers should make language teaching and culture teaching carry out at the same time. if language learners ignore the difference of culture, or lack the cultural awareness in english learning, they may not understand well others when those who have different cultural background have cross-cultural communication, even if they master english language very well. so culture teaching is an important part in english language teaching. fu lihua (2003.2) reported that the background knowledge is also very important for us to understand the reading materials. as english teachers, we have to make our students to know the background knowledge includes the history, the culture, and the customs. although many students have good knowledge of english, native pronunciation, and correct grammar, they often make the mistakes of culture in english. any language has its unique culture, if we only teach students the target language points without its culture, the students will become language-learning machines so that the language they learn cannot well be applied to their daily life. thus it is necessary to teach culture in english teaching, especially for students in senior high schools. for instance, students asked what the phrase “give someone a hand (帮助某人)” meant, what someone answered was “give someone a hand” (给某人一只手). and then they were told a story: a chinese person saw an american falling into a river, but the american didnt swim; when the american saw the chinese walking around him, he called the chinese: “please, please, give me a hand (帮助我)”. but the chinese thought why he would give him a hand (给他一只手), and said to him “no, i cant give you a hand (给你一只手). if give you a hand (给你一只手), i will die”. the chinese didnt help him. because nobody could correctly understand the american, he died at last. such example, not only make students master the phrase well, but also make them realize the function of culture in english teaching. therefore, in english teaching, we should pay attention to the relationship between language and culture and the importance of the culture teaching. but our teachers failed to do so, lots of them ignored to teach the culture.2.2 lack of flexibilitypaul lindsay traces his experience as a teacher of english and claims that an all-purpose teaching method does not exist. good teachers should be less concerned with methods and approaches than with adapting their teaching to the students, after studying their need, by choosing suitable materials and practical techniques. so the teachers should keep an open mind on new ideas about teaching and learning. try new and interesting ways but dont get hooked on one method. in the present reading teaching, our teachers only use the traditional three steps reading training, that is, “reading new wordsteaching grammardoing exercises.” as the result, we spend much time on teaching the language points instead of training the students ability of using language. 2.3 why the students fail to understand the texts?fan lianyi (2006.3) said that the process of english reading is affected by many factors. reading ability can only be improved by synthetically improvement of the entire ability related. listening, writing and speaking should be integrated into the process of reading teaching to make sure that we have a fruitful teaching. in his paper, he said the reading teaching should be based on teaching of the other three skills, so in my opinion we should learning reading skills from other three learning, because they depend on each other. english environment created by reading is the most authentic, direct, complete, economical and convenient one for learners, compared with those created by listening, speaking and writing. english is not our native language, so we have to read as many as we can, but there are many bad habits, such as: lip-moving, head-moving, finger-pointing, and over-dependence on the dictionaries, etc. so the teacher should try best to help students get away from these bad habits.iii. the methods of reading teaching 3.1 pre-reading activitiesli tingxiang (1983.3) claims that the pre-reading activities can increase the students concentration and set students purpose for reading. such activities could be arousing existing knowledge about the topic, helping the students to predict the contents of the text, etc. the purpose of pre-reading is to facilitate while-reading activities. the pre-reading activities are very important for the teachers to master. 3.1.1 predictingeric xu (2005) said the words prevent people from reading fast. one way to overcome this problem is to guess. there are many ways to guess the meaning of a new word. first we should find some hints. contexts, some phrases, such as “means”, “refer to”, “in other words”, “that is to say” are all the hints. he settles a lot of examples on words guessing. his ideas are not only useful for reading, but also for writing. the skill of predicting is to help students form a mental picture of what they are going to study before they read the text itself. here is a normal procedure that was given by eric xu (2005):step1. the teacher provides students with the title of the text. then students are asked to write questions in english to which they think they will find the answers in the text. at this step, make sure to tell the students that what they are doing is just prediction, and that their predictions do not necessarily have to be true after they read the text.step2. the teacher also asks students to write down the words that they think will appear in the text, according to the topic suggested by the title.directions: ask no less than 5 questions based on the title of the text. also write some possible words you expect to appear in the text.pre-questions.5.possible words mentionedstep3. ask students to share questions with each other in a group of four and then in the whole class.after students finish the first three steps, the next step for them is to read the text. ask them to read carefully, and to check whether the questions previously raised are answered or not in the text. at the same time, ask them to check if the vocabulary they predicted appears.wang qiang (2000.7) believes predicting is an important reading skill. students predictions, no matter right or wrong will get their mind closer to the theme of text to be read. before reading, the teacher can ask students some questions in order to activate their background knowledge that is relevant to the text which students are going to read. teachers also should ask the students to predict the titles, the questions which the question-masters will ask. predicting is a basic skill for the senior high school students, the teachers should train the students to master this skill.3.1.2 questioningthe reader might read the given questions as fast as possible, and then move to read the material. there is an advantage to do this. when the reader reads the material with the questions, he can save his time.b