Research on Strategies in Improving Teaching English Reading

1、 research on strategies in improving teaching english reading提高英语阅读教学策略的研究research on strategies in improving teaching english readingabstract: reading, as one of the four main skills in english learning, is one of the basic ways in learning a language. however, it is also a difficult part for stude

2、nts to improve. so english reading teaching is an important part of language classroom. how to help students improve reading efficiency is the major job for english teachers at school. to improve students reading ability, the teacher should let students grasp basic reading strategies in expectation

3、of helping students have the ability to use different sorts of skills to read different linguistic materials correctly. this paper intends to show common problems in teaching english reading, it focuses largely on reading strategies. the main purpose is to help the students to deal with the difficul

4、ties they meet in english reading and to help them to improve their reading ability gradually.key words: reading skills; students; reading ability; common problems; reading strategies摘要：阅读，作为学习英语的四大主要技巧之一，也是学习一门语言的基础方法之一。然而，也是对于学生来说难提高的一部分。所以英语阅读是语言课堂中一个重要部分。怎样有效地提高学生的阅读是在校英语老师的一个主要任务。为了提高阅读能力，老师需要让

5、学生掌握基本的阅读策略，这样，学生才能在阅读过程中有能力去用多种阅读技巧正确的读不同的语言材料。这篇论文旨在展示英语阅读教学中存在的共同问题，并广泛地关注阅读策略。论文的目的在于帮助学生如何解决在英语阅读中存在的困难及帮助他们逐渐提高阅读能力。关键字：阅读技巧；学生； 阅读能力； 共同问题 ； 阅读策略contentsi. general introduction.1ii. some factors which influence reading.1iii. common problems in teaching english reading.3a. limited vocabulary3b

6、. lack of reading skills.3c. lack of background knowledge.4d. poor reading habits.4iv. effective strategies in improving english reading teaching.5a. developing students interest in reading.5b. helping students cultivate good reading habits.6c. encouraging students to enhance vocabulary.7 d. introdu

7、cing cultural background knowledge in course.7e. introducing some useful reading skills.8v. conclusion.10works cited.11i. general introductionreading is one of the basic ways in learning a language. it is used and adopted by language learners when learning a language. it is generally believed that r

8、eading is by far the most important skill of the four skills for chinese learners of english. therefore, the teaching of reading plays a very important role in language classroom. on one hand, many college students will, after leaving their language class, come into contact largely with the written

9、form of the language; on the other hand, reading comprehension comprises up to 35% of the total mark in the annually held countrywide college english test band four and band six (cet-4/6 ). if a student is poor in reading, it is likely that he or she may fail in the test. however many students often

10、 complain that reading is their weakest point even if they have put a great deal of time and energy into it. in fact, according to the investigation, lots of students still have problems in reading. for example, they do not have a command of reading skills and cannot pick up useful messages. whats w

11、orse, quite a few students do not know what the main or the secondary idea is in reading course. whats more, some students have no specific ideas about extensive reading, intensive reading and fast reading. they can not distinguish them from each other, so they can not adopt effective ways to deal w

12、ith them. as a result, it is high time for english teachers to locate their students weak points in reading and try to provide corresponding countermeasures in teaching. in this paper, the author of this paper intends to explore chinese students difficulties and problems in reading and tries to put

13、forth some corresponding strategies in expectation of helping students to develop their reading skills and improve their reading efficiency.ii. some factors which influence readingsome people think that reading is a “passive” skill. in fact, “reading is an active information seeking process in which

14、 readers relate information in the text to what they already know” (sun 91). nowadays science technology is well developed; reading is obviously the chief way from which people gain and exchange messages. reading is one of the important links in teaching of a foreign language .it gives learners impo

15、rtant and sufficient materials for language input, and it is the foundation to improve students listening, speaking, and writing and translation abilities. so in various grades of english tests, reading stands at the top of the world. because of this, some teachers and scholars begin to research new

16、 teaching methods of english reading in order to improve students reading comprehension level. it is known that there are quite a few factors which may affect the students reading effect. if teachers want to help students improve their reading efficiency, the first thing they should do is to analyze

17、 these factors and then find effective way to deal with them. only in this way can teachers help students improve their reading ability. first, reading interests. interest is the best teacher. one of the best ways is to get some information from interest. reading ability is closely related to intere

18、st of reading. interests are the internal motive of reading loving. but interests are not been born, it needs to be cultivated and developed consciously. second, characteristics of students. students personality is also an important element which affects teaching of reading. “the ones who are outgoi

19、ng, natural, brave and have strong will always can undertake and adopt various tasks of learning and teaching methods ”(yang 33). the teachers responsibility is to teach students in accordance with their aptitude, and encourage poor ones confidence, and gradually make them overcome the short coming

20、of nature. to accomplish any task of learning, students have to get ready with knowledge, physiology, and psychology. the teachers, who teach reading, should make sure the exact time for teaching different skills. too early, students cannot follow; too late, that is a waste of time. furthermore, stu

21、dents initiative will be wreaked. neither of them is helpful for raising reading efficiency. third, education background. “students cultural background mainly refers to the educational accomplishment of the people surrounded, and the educational atmosphere of living environment, which make a notable

22、 influence for learning of english reading” (yin 98). if living with well educated people, they can borrow their knowledge, experiences for learning of reading; and they can widen their vision of all subjects at any time and anywhere; and decrease the suitable obstacles when they are reading types o

23、f works. the educational atmosphere of social environment makes an imperceptible influence for the improvement of reading ability. otherwise, if students live with the poor educated ones, there may be absorb little background knowledge. and they can hardly take the advantage of their knowledge accum

24、ulation. as a result, those will have poor reading ability. forth, reading speed: the reading program is composed of intensive reading, extensive reading and fast reading. most of the class time is devoted to intensive reading. extensive reading is usually done at home and fast reading is done rando

25、mly in class. teachers usually force students to read faster because multiple-choice questions for reading comprehension take many of the total scores in the tests, and all these readings must be done within a limited time. many students try to increase their effective reading speed but become disco

26、uraged when they find that if they try to go through a passage faster, they cannot comprehend what they read. “to increase the reading rate, students need to change the bad reading habits and raise their reading efficiency” (lan 65).iii. common problems in teaching english reading it needs to be poi

27、nted out that the problems dealt with in this paper refer to the students. and the so-called reading comprehension problem is not an isolated one, which is much more related some aspects. in fact, some common problems do exist in present reading. a. limited vocabularyit is self-evident that one can

28、not read without basic linguistic knowledge, let alone read efficiently. so linguistic knowledge is the first basic factor that affects accuracy and speed in reading comprehension. much more evidence has shown that vocabulary has a correlation with linguistic mastery. in order to improve reading spe

29、ed, enlarging ones vocabulary is becoming more and more important. if there are many new words in an article, it will prevent readers from reading fast. b. lack of reading skillsenglish is a living language and it is one of the most widely used ones in the world. english reading is not only one of t

30、he purposes of learning, but also the ways and means of entertaining. english reading skills are the most important ones, as well as learning some methods and strategies. english reading ability is one of the most important four skills. students who have been taught the traditional classroom approac

31、h to reading often have difficulty in reading comprehension. they do not know how to read english texts. they tend to read word for word and try to understand each meaning and every detail. according to clark (238), reading skills, from the methodological viewpoint, including scanning, skimming, rea

32、ding for thorough comprehension and critical reading while language skills refer to vocabulary, structure and discourse. if students do not grasp some reading skills, they will fail in reading.c. lack of background knowledge almost all reading researchers agree that background knowledge plays an imp

33、ortant role in reading comprehension. it is essential for all manner of inferences and text model during comprehension. however, since many students pay more attention to words and sentence structures and have little knowledge about the target culture, they often find themselves have great difficult

34、y in understanding the reading material completely especially when the cultural elements of english-speaking countries are involved. the infiltration of cultural background knowledge plays a very important role in teaching english reading, which helps students to understand the reading materials bet

35、ter as well as improves teaching efficiency. languages are influenced by their own culture, and are stamped with the brand of different cultures. if the students are not familiar with the culture background knowledge, when they are reading some materials, they can not get the exact meaning they want

36、. d. poor reading habits whatever students read, most of them read in the same way: word-by-word and sentence by sentence, which is a waste of time and energy. on the other hand, some students begin to read at once when they get a reading material. sometimes students read an article many times, but

37、they still dont understand what the article says. “whats more, some students even have the habit of saying the word to themselves in a low voice while comprehending a text” (lan115). besides, students also have some other bad reading habits in reading activity such as vocalization and inner speech.

38、the so-called vocalization refers to that fact that readers point to each word with the index finger, saying the word to them in a low voice while reading. however, inner speech may never actually pronounce any words. the reader just imagines the pronunciation or whispers words in his mind .his spee

39、ch organ are at rest, but his inner voice is still actively repeating the words along the line of print. when one has formed these bad habits, he can badly expect to grasp the process of reading. all these bad habits among the students not only hinder their reading speed, but also affect their readi

40、ng efficiency. iv. effective strategies in improving english reading teaching “for many students, reading is by far the most important of the four skills in a second language , particular in english a second or foreign language” (carrell 1).it is true that most of students english textbooks for stud

41、ents have introduced quite some good reading strategies, but the reading ability of most students in school is far from being satisfactory. reading teaching holds a very important status in english course. therefore, how to guide students to read in right way and help them improve their reading effi

42、ciency is becoming a major problem for english teachers. in this part, the author tries to propose some useful reading strategies in expectation of helping students read efficiently. a. developing students interest in reading students should know reading is not a passive skill; reading is an incredi

43、bly active occupation. interest is the best teacher. so language learners should be interested in what they are reading. the teacher must try to make reading teaching interesting and attractive, which is particularly important at the beginning of a course. interest is the secret of success. if stude

44、nts are not interested in english, they will not learn it well or they will feel very hard to learn it. but interest is postnatal, not innate. so, the key to the problem for english teachers is to arouse students interest. different teachers have different ideas of arousing students interest in lear

45、ning english. for example, teaching in situation, playing games, holding english competitions, the three skills which are role-playing, english songs, drawing, two minutes of english report before class, rewards, encouraging students self-expression and participation, teachers training and the harmo

46、nious relation between teacher and students. how to arouse students interest of english study in english reading teaching? most of students are aware of the disadvantages of the traditional teaching method, which aims at the grammatical rules. before teaching a new lesson, teachers lead to read the

47、new words one by one and explain them in mother tongue, then paraphrase or translate the texts sentence by sentence. this grammatical explanation approach makes students feel very bored. they often neglect the protracted and arduous nature of study, so their interest decreases and even disappear as

48、the development of study. the teacher should foster students to have a good learning habit, change teaching methods, show great emotion to the less advanced students, and always give opportunities of success to students. in order to arouse students interest, teacher must pay attention to their physi

49、cal characteristics. based on different students different psychological character, teachers should respect students different psychologies, and their sense of self-esteem, make chances for them to express themselves and make full use of their specialties. of course, there are some other effective m

50、ethods to arouse students interest in reading that are unmentioned here. but it is sure that teachers might do better in this field if they combine their own experience with others.b. helping students cultivate good reading habits the reading habit is actually cultivated by reading itself. good read

51、ing habit is a more important reading skill. for students, almost all study involves reading. many ways can cultivate good reading habits. first, reading fast as soon as possible. most students read much too slowly. right now they are probably reading this slower than they need for good comprehensio

52、n. studies show that fast readers are the best readers, and that slow readers often lose their concentration and comprehension abilities because their minds will wander out of boredom. second, vocabulary building as more as possible, the more words students are familiar with, the less they are aware

53、 of reading words and the more they are aware of content and meaning. expanding vocabulary will help students to read more effectively and rapidly. many students simply skip over words they do not understand, this, naturally, hurts their overall comprehension. try to guess what the word means from c

54、ontext clues, from the words around it. dont skip over them. above all, good reading habits like these can help students to be more successful in reading. c. encouraging students to enhance vocabulary educational researchers have found a strong correlation between reading and vocabulary knowledge. i

55、n other words, students who have a large vocabulary are usually good readers. obviously, vocabulary forms a block for the poor reader. in fact, some new words will prevent students from reading, so vocabulary is very important in language learning. if they really want to enhance vocabulary, there ar

56、e two methods; firstly, the best and easiest way to enhance vocabulary is to read extensively. if students read extensively they are likely to be or become a good reader! the teacher should try to introduce an extensive reading scheme whenever possible to encourage learners to read after class. seco

57、ndly, they can use the rules of word formation; many words in the english language are made up of word parts called roots, prefixes, and suffixes, this method is used to help readers get the meaning of an unknown word by analyzing the word structure, which is by dividing words into usable parts such

58、 as roots, prefixes and suffixes. they should learn a certain number of new words by heart every day. it is possible for students to memorize some words every day without much difficulty. so if students do it, they will enhance vocabulary.d. introducing cultural background knowledge in courseculture and language are closely related. a language can never be learned in a cultural vacuum. language learning and culture learning are not separ