How to Improve Students.doc

How to Improve Students Reading Ability Reading is one of the important means to get information during study and a necessary basic skill for English learners. The importance of reading ability has been embodied in National Matriculation Tests of recent years: The proportion of reading comprehension exercises in the total score has risen to a 40-t0-150 new high year by year. The purposes of examination vary from the understanding of words to the structures of article, and from the decision of details to the summary of general ideas. The subjects and the forms of structures of the selected reading materials, which are all extracted from original works, are diverse. The test designers have obviously laid more importance on the test of reading comprehension, in compassion with the previous National Matriculation Tests. Because of the time limitation, students have to finish it quickly and accurately when reading. To achieve the goal, students need to develop good reading methods and habits to promote reading efficiency.I. Attaching Importance to the Accumulation of Vocabulary and UsageHigh buildings rise from the ground and we cant build high buildings without solid foundation. Therefore, if there is no basic language knowledge, we wont be able to read and understand. According to the statistical characteristics of vocabulary, American linguist, Rriller (19780)，said :If we know 25 most common English words, we can recognize 33% of the words on every page on average; if we know 135 commonly used words, the words recognized by us on a page will be 50%; if we know 2500 words, we will recognize 78%; if 5000, we will recognize 80%; once we know 10, 000, the words we recognize will possibly be 92% on each page on average. Its clear that reading ability is inseparable from how much our vocabulary is. At present, the vocabulary of most students is small, which is the main factor affecting the improvement of students reading ability.In the recent years, the total amount of vocabulary in the five reading passages for the National Matriculation Test has maintained a trend of increase. The increase of new words results from the words produced by word-formation and the ones out of the syllabus. And larger vocabulary causes the reading materials to be more difficult, and leads candidates to read them several times to understand them. In addition to that, the using of more formal natural language in reading materials also greatly slows down the reading speed. For this reason, we should expand our vocabulary as possible as we can. Its should be said that the larger vocabulary we master, the more solid reading foundation we have.II. Commanding the grammatical knowledge FirmlyFrom the 1980s to the early 1990s ,English teaching of senior high schools mainly adopted Grammar-Translation Method：Teachers analyzed sentence elements in detail but neglected the training of students all-round abilities, especially neglected the cultivation of listening and speaking abilities. However, over more than 10 years teaching reform, many experienced teachers have gone from one extreme to the other: They seldom analyze difficult long sentences in articles and say nothing about the sentences with complicated structures. As we all know, as students increase their reading amount, they will meet more and more difficult and long sentences. In that case, if students fail to analyze sentence structures correctly, they will have difficulties understanding the meaning of these sentences, not to mention a whole article.The structures of sentences in English reading materials have tended to be more complex in the recent years, so the grammar knowledge has been already underlined in reading .If you come across confusing difficult sentences in reading, you can analyze them appropriately by grammar knowledge and understand the relationship between different parts. In the way, you will have an accurate command of the general idea of an article. Take the paper of NMET2008 as an example: The researchers said that among the problems with some earlier studies is that they often failed to take into account those people most at risk for skin cancer-people with fair skin and freckles, for example, are more likely to use sunscreen. As a result, it may appear that sunscreen users get cancer more often. The main structure of the first sentence is as following: For the part-“The research said that .is that they failed to .” ，the first “that” introduces an objective clause, and the objective clause also includes an inverted structure, where the subject is “that they often failed to take into account those people most at risk for skin cancer” and the predicative is “among the problems with some earlier studies”. After the dash is a parenthesis. In a word, only after we get a clear idea of sentence elements one by one, can we grasp the meaning of the sentence.III. Increasing Reading and Enrich Knowledge of Cultural Background Research and the practice indicate that the background knowledge is playing the very important role during the reading process. Without relevant background knowledge, reading can be very difficult. Otherwise, reading will become simpler.(no matter what kind of articles you read or what kind of questions it asks, the specific knowledge will never change. The passage may be very easy for you if you have a understanding for its topic in advance; for example, liberal arts students can have a deeply understandings about history and literature while science students may find it easy to read nature science.)Moreover, most of the articles are original, which use more idioms, and involves the British and American cultures, habits, customs, and special language backgrounds based on the specific cultures.(such as “ghost town” which means a place once thriving but now less popular, the bark is bigger than bite which means sb or sth is threatening or aggressive but not engaged in fight. ) To lay a good foundation for improving reading quality, the students, who studies English as a foreign language have to be familiar with life habits, cultural background, local conditions and customs, and life styles of some English-speaking countries, besides certain knowledge about the history of British and American literature. For example, in the reading passage A about geography in the NMET2003 reading materials, two “farthest/most distant inhabited islands” were introduced-one was Tristan da Cunha recorded in “Guinness Book of Records” and the other one was Easter Island. There were many proper nouns, which would confuse less-experienced students but be easier to those having background knowledge about Easter Day.VI. Mastering the Effective Reading Skillsi) Skimming or SkippingSkimming is a method of fast reading. On the base of first glancing over the stems to figure out general ideas and get a clear idea of the narrative structures, skim or skip daringly so as to read quickly and understand articles on the whole. The contents that can be skimmed or skipped include cumbersome examples, multiple paralleled demonstrations, unimportant uncommon words, lengthy names and addresses etc.The key of skimming is to read at the fastest speed under the premise of grasping the main point of an article. The purpose of skimming is to obtain the sufficient information to answer relevant questions accurately. ii) Looking-up methodThe looking-up reading method is a method of looking up information. It is a skill to search a certain specific information quickly and purposefully. It requires accuracy and speed rather than read through the full text, only if you find out the target contents. Looking-up method is mainly used to gain detailed information and answer specific questions about details in test. And these questions are usually related to 5w and 1h, namely who, what, when, where why and how. They are sometimes related to specific figures, such as length, width, height, distance, size, and measurement etc. To improve reading speed and the efficiency of problem-solving, we need to train students ability to carefully scan relevant words with eyes to get the needed information in the shortest time and then make a right choice.iii) Reading-by-Searching MethodReading-by-Searching Method is reading carefully to get concrete information and arrive at a deep understanding of an article. It is mainly used to read around the questions after reading passages, including deta