（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）大学生阅读理解中的错误分析.pdf

摘 要 许多研究发现学生们的学习方法深深受到他们过去学习经历的影响。在英语阅读 学习中，大学新生还没有摆脱他们在高中养成的英语学习方式，对他们来说，阅读英 语主要是为了学习英语生词、短语和句型。鉴于此，学生们对概括课文意思不太感兴 趣，也很少把英语阅读看作一大乐趣，而近年来的阅读研究表明，读者对阅读过程和 阅读策略的元认知意识影响读者的阅读能力。为此，为了把读者的需要与课堂教学有 效结合起来，本论文把大学新生的阅读错误作为研究重点，利用二语习得中的错误分 析法和全语言教学中的阅读差异分析法两个分析工具来分别分析两种阅读方式中的 错误：朗读中的误用线索失误和默读中的理解错误。 本研究数据分别从阅读理解测试、调查问卷、面对面访谈、出声思考和朗读实验 收集到。实验结果对收集的三种主要的阅读错误进行了描述与分析，识别出阅读错误 的主要来源。实验结果显示本体层次的朗读失误主要为意义改变的代替线索失误；文 本层次的理解错误主要是对生词、复杂句式和文本衔接的错误理解；语篇层次的理解 错误主要是对语篇组织和语篇连贯的错误理解，以及利用个体图式概念对语篇中的概 念的错误阐释。实验结果还显示了较好读者在本体层次上的朗读失误较少，复述文章 的能力较好，朗读失误主要表现为自我纠正，意义改变的朗读失误较少；而较差读者 在本体层次上的朗读失误较多，复述文章的能力较差，朗读失误主要表现为代替线索 失误，意义改变的朗读失误较多；在文本层次上，较好读者与较差读者的理解错误都 集中表现为词汇理解错误；但较差读者比较好读者在语篇层次上表现出更多理解错 误。 通过对主要错误的严重性进行评估，本研究发现学生们对英语阅读的错误观念是 造成阅读错误的主要因素，其次是他们使用阅读策略的能力不足。本研究结果还表明 词汇理解错误是阅读理解中最严重的错误，因为对词汇的误解常常造成学生们的阅读 理解障碍，进而影响他们的阅读兴趣和阅读动机。根据以上研究结果，本研究建议课 堂阅读教学首先要传授学生们如何处理阅读中生词的方法和技巧，扫除他们的阅读障 碍，培养广泛阅读英语的兴趣，其次要对学生们对阅读的错误观念进行有效纠正，最 后要全面培养学生们的整体阅读策略，藉此提高他们阅读英语的能力和对英语语言的 敏感度。 关键词：阅读错误；错误分析；差异分析；阅读理解 abstract researches have shown that students are strongly influenced by their own prior educational experiences. college freshmen haven t gone out of their reading styles of the test- centered readings formed in their high school. to them, english readings are mainly concerned with vocabulary and structure learning. this results in the lack of desire to seek for meanings and even less to seek for pleasure from their reading. recent l2 reading researches suggest that readers metacognitive awareness of their reading processes and strategies enhances proficiency. attempting to bring the reader s needs into the concern of the instructor s classroom teaching, the present study focuses on the analysis of reading errors learners made upon the start of their first- year college english class. data were collected from a reading comprehension test, a self- designed questionnaire, think- aloud and read- aloud individual reading interviews and analyzed from reading miscues and reading comprehension errors. through analysis of these errors, the major causes were recognized. the results indicate that reading errors are mainly: at substance level, miscues of substitution with meaning change; at text level, comprehension errors caused by the misunderstanding of vocabulary, complicated syntax and cohesion; at discourse level, comprehension errors caused by the misprocessing of discourse organization, coherence and student s misinterpretation based on their own schemata. the results also indicate that good readers made less miscues and retold the story well; poor readers made comparatively more miscues and couldn t retell the story well; both good and poor readers made mostly lexical comprehension errors at text level and good readers made much less errors than poor readers at discourse level. through evaluation of errors, the present study regards students reading misconception as the most serious factor influencing their reading errors. the next is their weak handling of the reading strategies. the lexical errors in reading are graded as the most serious errors as they affect students interest in english readings and their motivation to continue their readings. based on the findings, three ways are briefly recommended for classroom implications for teaching reading as ways in handling vocabulary in reading, ways in changing students misconceptions on reading and ways in developing holistic reading skills, so as to improve students english reading ability and build up their english language sense. key words: reading errors; error analysis; miscue analysis; reading comprehension 中南民族大学 学位论文原创性声明 本人郑重声明：所呈交的论文是本人在导师的指导下独立进行研 究所取得的研究成果。除了文中特别加以标注引用的内容外，本论文 不包含任何其他个人或集体已经发表或撰写的成果作品。对本文的研 究做出重要贡献的个人和集体，均已在文中以明确方式标明。本人完 全意识到本声明的法律后果由本人承担。 作者签名： 日期： 年 月 日 学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解学校有关保留、使用学位论文的规定， 同意学校保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和电子版， 允许论文被查阅和借阅。本人授权中南民族大学可以将本学位论文的 全部或部分内容编入有关数据库进行检索，可以采用影印、缩印或扫 描等复制手段保存和汇编本学位论文。 本学位论文属于 1、保密，在_年解密后适用本授权书。 2、不保密。 （请在以上相应方框内打“” ） 作者签名： 日期： 年 月 日 导师签名： 日期： 年 月 日 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 1 chapter one: introduction in early researches, brundage and mackeracher (1980) indicate that adult learners are profoundly influenced by past learning experiences, present concerns and future prospects. they also bring to learning their own beliefs, goals, attitudes, and decisions, which in turn influence how they approach their learning. however, some of the teachers beliefs, goals, attitudes, and decisions influence how they approach teaching. while learning is the goal of teaching, it is not necessarily the mirror image of teaching. in english readings, freshmen haven t gone out of their reading styles of the test- centered readings formed in their high school. to them, english readings are mainly concerned with vocabulary and structure learning. this results in the lack of desire to seek for meanings and even less to seek for any pleasure from their reading. this misconception highlights their reading purposes and their reading styles. there are actually very few reading strategies used in their readings. however, to them, the reading strategies are just the ways to cope with their reading comprehension questions in their language tests. thus the reading class to them should also be concentrated on learning those language points. instead, teachers focus classroom teaching on developing reading skills and the vocabulary has rarely been addressed as the learning focus. more often, teachers might aim at teaching a reading lesson with the purpose of developing extensive reading skills, while students take the activity as an opportunity for intensive reading, building up their knowledge of vocabulary and idioms. students might value some language learning strategies that teachers may try to discourage. the mismatches of the purposes and procedures between classroom learning and teaching have been overwhelming throughout the first term of the college. many researchers and practitioners emphasize that metacognition is an important dimension that enables readers to coordinate and regulate deliberate efforts at efficient reading and effective studying (wong the temptation is greater on the levels of text and discourse than that of substance, where failure is visible and leads to an immediate breakdown of communication (p.167). it is easier to look into production errors than receptive errors. with respect to the reading comprehension, error analysis studies have exclusively focused on the miscue analysis, a study of errors in oral readings as indicators of the readers strategies in using various cues present in the text (goodman, 1973). by analyzing the miscues learners make as they read out loud, instructors can learn how these learners use the three language systems and various reading strategies to construct meaning. by doing a miscue analysis on learners, their reading skills can be analyzed and they can be helped to use strategies to improve their reading based on the kinds of cues they use. miscue analysis have been extensively used in general education to record formal teacher observations of students reading, particularly the reading progress of the children on various subjects. a miscue analysis provides in- depth information about what strategies a reader is using and helps to identify areas that need attention for reading to develop. through miscue analysis, teachers can better monitor a learners progress along the path to reading success, and identify the strengths and needs of students. depending on the prevalence and types of miscue, teachers may decide whether any intervention is required and where its focus should be. nevertheless, an assumption implicit in miscue inventories is that oral reading reflects similar processes to those involved in silent reading, and hence errors detected while students are reading aloud are representative of errors in their silent reading. however, whenever asked to read aloud, learners pay much attention to the pronunciation instead of the meaning of the passage. the silent reading process yet may provide a very different picture. monitoring and assessment are critical for successful teaching. they identify what needs to be taught (and what doesn t) and, as part of the evaluation process they inform what s been successful, what hasn t and can provide insights into why it has not been analysis of errors in college students english reading 4 successful. for the teacher it can be very rewarding plotting student change over time and providing powerful documentation for student progress. the new curricula demand much concern for the teachers teaching action and the students learning process as well. learners should be responsible for reflecting upon and evaluating their own learning, and should take the initiative to make changes when necessary. so it is essential to collect learners data and conduct a needs analysis before designing a learner- centered curriculum for reading class. the aim of self- directed learning is to promote independence in learners so that they can continue their language development and take increasing responsibility for their learning. thus, attempting to bring the reader s needs into the concern of the instructor s classroom teaching, to have a clear picture of what is inefficient in learner s reading and how those inefficiencies are caused, the present study focuses on the analysis of errors the learners made upon the start of their first- year college english reading class. the errors were elicited by the conventional multiple- choice reading comprehension tests and the factors perceived by the students that influence their reading were obtained from one self- designed questionnaire. the selected students were then asked to give a think- aloud verbal report on the reading comprehension process of their reading test, to give a read- aloud oral reading. the obtained data were then analyzed based on error analysis and miscue analysis procedures. through analysis of these errors, the major errors in reading were then identified and classified at three linguistic levels; the major causes and factors that cause those major errors were then detected. based on those findings, classroom implications for teaching reading are briefly introduced in the end. 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 5 chapter two: literature review 2.1 errors, miscues in his 1967 paper, corder made a distinction between a mistake and an error, associated error with failures in competence and mistakes with failures in performance. a mistake is a random performance slip caused by fatigue, excitement, etc., and therefore can be readily self- corrected, an error is a systematic deviation made by learners who have not yet mastered the rules of the l2. a learner cannot self- correct an error because it is a product reflective of his or her current stage of l2 development, or underlying competence. therefore, mistake is of no significant in the analysis whereas the error is. following above view, the present study will focus on reading comprehension errors and all incorrect comprehension in reading will be recorded as reading errors. goodman (1965) defines an actual observed response in oral reading which does not match the exact text as a miscue. he uses the term miscue, rather than error to define the departure from the text orally read by the reader, reflecting his view that a departure from the text is not necessarily erroneous. in fact, he regards a miscue as a window in the reading process and does not consider it to be an error because miscues reflect learners strengths rather than their weaknesses, and they are the genuine sources that reveal readers strategies within the reading process. through analysis of reading miscues student make when they read aloud, teachers can learn the types of strategies and cueing systems their students apply to negotiate the text and to construct the meaning (goodman, 1975). based on the critical reading instruction, all readers have different purposes in reading, different opinions, backgrounds and experiences, and thus with different schemata, so inevitably all readers get something different from a text (nuttall, 2002). however, as to the foreign language readers, the meaning of many texts used in class is not so much in dispute. good readers should be able to always make out the meaning the writer intends instead of the meaning they expect (grellet, 2000). reading practices and comprehension tests in a foreign language classroom environment lie mostly on the undisputed meaning of the texts. in addition, not the exact words in reading have been routinely considered as errors by both learners and instructors in the classroom setting. therefore, in the present study, all incorrect understanding of text in reading will be indicated as reading comprehension errors, analysis of errors in college students english reading 6 and all the words not exactly matching the text in reading aloud process in the present study will follow goodman s view to be labeled as reading miscues. 2.2 error analysis james (1998) defines error analysis (ea) as the process of determining the incidence, nature, causes and consequences of unsuccessful language, the study of linguistic ignorance, the investigation of what people do not know and how they attempt to cope with their ignorance. its object of enquiry, then, is the foreign language (fl) learner s ignorance of the target language. learners sometimes compensate this ignorance by expressing themselves in the tl in alternative ways. the study of this substitutive language or interlanguage is error analysis. second language acquisition theoreticians study this interlanguage sui generis while error analysts study it in relation to the target language (james, 1998). it is an approach to understanding sla that consists of compiling a corpus of fl learners deviations from the target language norms the errors learners make classifying these errors by type and hypothesizing possible sources for the errors. in the history of sla research, error analysis is a phase of enquiry which followed on from contrastive analysis (johnson and the accumulation of empirical studies of sla indicated that the contrastive analysis hypothesis made the wrong prediction. corder (1967) captures this shift of interest in his well- known article, dealing with the significance of learners errors. errors came to be viewed as a reflection of foreign learners mental knowledge of the second language: their interlanguage grammars (selinker, 1972). researchers therefore began to analyze corpora of sl/fl errors in order to understand better the nature of interlanguage grammars. however, ea gradually fell into disfavor by the mid- 1970s, and the theoretical ground was being cleared for the new il paradigm. schachter and celce- murcia (1977) indicate that by focusing only on errors, researchers have been denied the access to the whole picture. they study only what learners are doing wrong, but not what make them successful. harley (1980) puts it: the study of errors that l2 learners make can certainly provide vital clues as to the competence in the tl, but they are only part of the picture. it is equally important to determine whether the learner s use of “ correct” forms approximates that of 中南民族大学硕士学位论文 7 the native speaker (p.4). meanwhile ea is also an inductive phase of enquiry in sla research. it works from corpora of collected samples of error and tries to draw generalizations about patterns in those samples. work since 1980s has on the whole been deductive. deductive approaches are potentially much richer sources of explanation than inductive approaches, and for that reason few researchers nowadays conduct error analyses (johnson page, 1990). james (1998) states that, after all, fl learners supply a seemingly endless source of errors in their work, and these learners are generous in their invention of new errors in getting their meaning across. in line with chomsky s insight that learners can benefit from finding out, directly or indirectly, what is not possible in the language, the negative strategy approach should be called upon. since the number and types of non- sentence in a language are infinite, there would be no point in trying to list them all for the learners to avoid. only by the conduction of ea, can the screening be made manageable by the disregard of all but those malformations that the learners themselves do make. thus, james (1998) emphasizes that there will be ea as long as there is incompleteness, an overall insufficiency compared with native speaker (ns) competence, or failure to attain full ns- like knowledge of the tl. 2.3 miscue analysis the concept of miscue analysis was first established by goodman in 1965. goodman and his colleagues in the 1960s were interested in the processes occurring during reading, and believed that miscues (any departure from the text by the reader) could provide a picture of the underlying cognitive processes. goodman (1975) identifies a miscue as an actual observed response in oral reading which does not match the expected response (p.94). an inventory of a student s miscues involves selecting text of sufficient length and difficulty to ensure that a student will make at least 25 errors, tape- recording the oral reading. as the student reads the text, his or her reading is documented by coding any unexpected responses or miscues, and a further hour for analysis. a further step requires a retelling of the story as a comprehension check. then the results are analyzed to reveal the analysis of errors in college students english reading 8 types of strategies and use of cueing systems that the student applied to negotiate the text