Abstract
As is known to all, learning English well is very important today. But it is not easy to make it, especially for the middle school students. One of the most important skills to master for senior students is reading. However, how to obtain the ability for reading comprehension largely depends on methods of teaching. So, as a senior high school teacher, a variety of teaching methods are required in the detailed process of teaching. If the guide of teachers is properly used, much can be derived from the teaching of reading passages. Once we can improve their enthusiasm in studying English, they will have greater tendency to learn it better. Then the efficiency will be better. In the writer’s opinion, texts in the Senior English For China ( SEFC ) books must be used fully and properly.
In this article, the writer emphasizes the importance on reading teaching in senior high schools, and regards reading to be the center in English teaching. In the following chapters, the writer tells from the exact contents in reading and the ways of teaching. And last of all, he talks about the National Matriculation English Test (NMET), some tips on revision for reading practice. The writer advocates reading revision should go well with the reading tendencies shown in the recent NMET examinations.
Key words: SEFC NMET extensive reading intensive reading
Contents
Introduction----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3
ChapterⅠ The importance of teaching on reading
ChapterⅡ What is to teach in reading
ChapterⅢ How to organize a reading lesson
Conclusion
Bibliography
Introduction
The stage of reading is a process of recognition of language. Reading is helpful to strengthen and enlarge vocabulary，enrich cultural knowledge and improve ability of using a foreign language. Reading can train the ability of thinking, comprehending and generalize the ability of reading. To emphasize reading teaching is necessary. “Laying emphasis to promote the ability of reading" is one of English teaching purpose of the syllabus in senior high schools. A basic method that makes use of the English material is to train the students’ comprehending ability. And also, reading is a good way of fulfilling the practical social intercourse. Strengthening reading training can help students pursue more chances to gain language knowledge and understand the proper use of them. The ability of analyzing and gaining knowledge from in and out of class can be fulfilled. Meanwhile, reading also provides the students opportunities to seek beauty from enjoyment of different literature.
Chapter Ⅰ The Importance of Teaching on Reading
As is known to us all, reading is one of the four essential skills in English language learning. Since most students in our country have more opportunity to read English matters than to converse with an English speaker, it's of great importance for secondary school students to have sufficient training to develop their ability to read. But numerous facts have proved that most of secondary school graduates don't really know how to read. To many of them, only reading aloud is reading. This is because many teachers only emphasize the importance of reading aloud. They neglect the far more useful and important skill of reading silently. Thus how to teach reading widely and effectively has become a problem of great importance.
Reading is important not only because it is the main access to knowledge but also because it is one of the four useful skills in learning a foreign language. Reading teaching plays a very important part in the whole of English teaching in senior high schools, also it is a key means to train the students' capacity for reading comprehension. For Chinese people, reading is not only the purpose of English study, but also the important and chief way of studying English. Undoubtedly, whether the students have obtained the capacity for reading comprehension will greatly affect their further study of the language in the future.
In senior high school, text is the center and also the best teaching form and integrated teaching material in which the students learn phonetic, vocabulary and grammar and gain the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Text is used to have reading comprehension training and keep the student constantly interested in learning English. According to contents of the textbook, two periods of reading teaching are required for each unit. The reading materials contain so much information and they are rich in various of useful knowledge. So reading is the teaching emphasis in each unit. In fact, it greatly affects the teaching process of English. So, reading comprehension of the text is put special emphasis on.
I talk about reading teaching in senior high school because I personally regard reading to be very important. For Chinese students, most of the children begin to learn English in primary school and continue the study with sentence drills and patterns as main work. In this period, listening and speaking are paid more attention to. While in senior high school, students are eager to gain more knowledge to enrich their knowledge on the second language. The main task for teachers is help the students form a good habit of reading, seek and clear up useful information. The Senior English For China (SEFC) textbook provides a variety of reading materials ranging from history, geography, culture, customs and inhabitants in English-speaking countries. So making full use of the reading materials is one of the most import tasks during the fundamental stage in English teaching. What’s more, reading test is occupying a large part in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET) year by year, with the score taking up 1/3 of the whole. In 2003 NMET, five reading passages composed the reading comprehension part with a total number of words, 2,193. So without systematic and regular reading training, students will surely get lost in the final stage of English revision, especially in the year of grade 3. Reading teaching goes with reading training well will lead to success of English revision.
I highlight reading not only it is the most important task in class but also it is the most useful and important skill in learning English out of class. The time as well as the reading material is much too limited in class. So making full use of time out of class is of great importance. The teacher should help the students choose reading materials which are helpful to foster the students’ ability to study on their own. The amount of reading out of class should reach a level of 200,000 words according to the requirement in the syllabus.
“ Reading makes a full man”(Francis Bacon), however, I want to say extensive reading makes a well-formed man. Due to constant-changing knowledge and fast-paced modern life, we should keep well informed if we really want to keep pace with fast-developing society. We can get to know a lot of things hardly to be known form the social circle we live in. At this point, reading extensively can really help us. Because of the reasons of money, time and so on, we may not be able to travel all the time. But reading extensively can solve this problem. When you are reading, you feel that you are witnessing something real.
Taking into account of all these factors, we can easily find out that reading is really a good way of learning, and is an effective method to solve the problems we have met.
Chapter Ⅱ What Is to Teach in Reading
As we mentioned above, reading teaching is so important that it is necessary to talk about what should be taught in a reading class. The teacher should encourage the students to read more, to practice more. In order to improve the students’ reading ability, much work needs to be dealt with, which ranges from the language knowledge (vocabulary, sentence patterns, grammar, and some idiomatic expressions) to the contents and some cultural background of the text. In this way, abilities on reading methods, reading speed, reading skill, accuracy and depth will surely be promoted. Meanwhile as a teacher, during the process of teaching, he has the responsibility to teach the students ways of reading.
Generally speaking, there are two types of reading. They are intensive reading and extensive reading. Both intensive reading and extensive reading are very important in English study. But each of them is stressed in different stages. Firstly the students should learn to do extensive reading. In this step, the main task is to get the general idea of the text, which is helpful to analyze the structure of the text and find out the topics of each paragraph. In the second stage, the students need to read the text carefully and exactly and deal with some detailed information such as vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar, some idiomatic expressions even the inner thoughts of the writer. So intensive reading is more complicated than extensive reading. For a reading text, the readers require both intensive and extensive reading according to the aims of reading.
In text teaching, students not only have to learn language knowledge but also communicate and read in English, which require us to deal with the relationship between structure and content. During the process of text teaching, try to get the students understand that content decides structure while structure serves for content. When learning language knowledge itself instead of putting it into certain contexts, we can’t learn English well and use it freely. Sentences show their communication function only in certain contexts. Using sentence structure correctly doesn’t always mean sentences are properly arranged in a suitable situation. We can’t grasp the spirit of the language without considering its background and its contextual function.
In the process of reading teaching we should change the traditional habit that a text is taught just in order to learn the language itself. We have the responsibility to show the students the inner thoughts of the writer. With true understanding of the series of sentence patterns, enable the students to analyze the general and main ideas of the text, learn more about the writer and the background, abbreviate and even retell it without much difficulty. Sentence patters don’t make sense without certain context which fulfills its communication function. So the teacher ought to use the reading passages in the SEFC carefully. It will be a very effective way to help master a foreign language. We will never be able to catch up with the spirit of the foreign language when we go against the natural process of learning the language.
To get reading ability is one of the most important tasks in English teaching, especially during the period of senior grade 1 and grade 2. We should consider the fact that the students always understand something from outside into inside. As the students come to a higher grade, reading teaching is strengthened, there are more and more treading texts, and the length of them grow longer. The number of reading comprehension practice is increasing, which is more complex. It’s a good way to put the practice in proper order and lead the students to think actively and cultivate the ability to understand the writer’s purpose and the theme of the article. For example, the questions asked in reading lessons can show and nourish different understanding levels. After the students finish reading a text the first time, a teacher should offer some questions on surface understanding, such as facts mentioned in the text, who, when, where, what, why and some simple comparison and so on. Such questions just require the students understand what the text itself tells you and reproduce the main idea of the text mechanically, which cause the students to be familiar with the main content of the context and improve the communication between a teacher and the students. We can take it as the base to have the deeper logical thinking and the writer’s inner thoughts.
To understand deeply needs the students read much, they have to learn to judge and understand the writer’s purpose, the theme of the text and predict the possible following events by making use of information provided by the writer, the existed background (knowledge on social and cultural background and social experience) by looking through information lying in the text surface. Such questions include 1. The facts not mentioned by the writer, 2. Summing the main idea, 3. Predicting a possible activity caused by a series of activities mentioned in the text, 4. Telling about the characters, time and place, 5. Conjecturing the purpose of the character’ activities and feature of the characters, 6. Conjecturing the actual meaning of the metaphorical language by the writer. And also it is important for the students to do comparison work in the similar type of reading material. In this way, the students acquire experience in reading step by step.
ChapterⅢ How to Organize A Reading Lesson
To attain the request of “laying emphasis on reading comprehension”, the text must be the main tool. At the same time, the role that a teacher plays in traditional class must be changed greatly. The traditional teaching method wants changing in which the students receive knowledge passively.
“Guide- reading- consolidation” is strongly proposed to lead the students to participate in the reading activity actively. The teacher is required to accomplish the teaching task by using proper method. And then according to the students' response, the teacher can help the students do more work for consolidation. Guide is regarded as very important for the teacher predominates in the whole of teaching .The teacher needs to do careful preparation before reading which we call pre-reading. With the information they attain in pre-reading, the students can read the text through more easily. And after that much consolidation work is needed. So, in reading teaching, guide is necessary, reading is central, and consolidation is emphatic.
At present English teaching demands teaching while practicing. I insist on training the students’ reading skill through interaction. In a reading class the students need to take part in the reading activity enthusiastically and actively. What a teacher must do is not only carry out intercourse successfully, but also show the students the correct reading methods. Get the students into the habit of reading actively. Encourage the students to tell and exchange their reading experience. In the ways above, the students can read with mobility, methods, creation, and character. Finally the students can do reading independently.
To achieve the goals above, the teacher must improve the students’ reading habit, get rid of the barrier, and create good conditions. Good habit can help improve reading speed and ability, considering the fact that the students in senior high grade one read slowly and can’t understand the reading material easily on their own. The teacher must direct them on reading methods. The students should get into the habit of silent reading from loud reading, which help the students grasp the general idea much faster. The following ways can be taken to make the students do silent reading: 1. Read the text silently, making no noise while reading 2. Avoid looking backward 3. Try not to translate everything into one’s native language 4. Try to finish reading the text within limited time. This is the valid method of improving one’s speed on reading, which will successfully draw students’ attention to the contents for further understanding.
Text is good reading materials but not good enough. If analyzing the NMET reading comprehension section. We can see that the students should deal with the information by using reading methods at the level of discourse. The testing points include the aspects as follows: understanding the surface information, distinguishing the discourse purpose, generalizing the theme, sieving the facts and the opinions, analyzing the function of the paragraphs In the discourse and understanding some vocabulary, sentence patterns and paragraphs as well. So the structure of the text is as important as the information carried by the language itself. The topics, in 2003NMET and 2004NMET, suggest reading teaching cover as many topics as possible and learn to sieve information from a variety of reading materials. The teacher should study the NMET carefully and exactly. In this way, he can choose reading materials suitable for the students.
What can be done to strengthen the students’ reading capability? The teacher should explore some effective methods in teaching. The teacher should try to enable the students to deal with the new words without referring to the dictionary. Materials that arouse the students’ attention and enthusiasm can help the students know about new vocabulary on their own. Meanwhile it is up to guide the students to seek proper ways for overcoming the difficulty when they come across some new words. The teacher must make the students know some knowledge on word-formation such as affixation (prefixes and suffixes), composition, conversion, blending, shortening and acronyms and their practical functions. Making good use of the context is helpful. And last of all, the teacher must make sure the students are confident and active in actual reading practice. A good teacher is always keen to develop the student's potential, Strengthen reading capacity and improve the interest in reading.
Since the students have formed the correct reading habit and acquire some experience in grade1and grade2, we should make an overall plan to make the revision systematic. The teacher should grasp the NMET tendency so that they can know what to do and how to do in the reading training Don’t take it for granted that it is the most effective way to do a great deal of reading comprehension practice. It’s not proper only to pay attention to the problems after the reading materials and not to analyze the discourse structure.
So, there should be proper methods for reading training in senior grade3. First of all, we should make good use of the reading materials in the selected textbooks, enriching the students’ vocabulary, strengthening their sense of language. The contradiction between reading speed and reading accurate level must be well settled. The students should learn to deal with the redundant information and get effective information quickly. They should also learn to make an integrated use of the information. And the students’ emotional factor must be considered. The students should not think that the purpose of reading is only to finish the questions following the reading materials and lose their interest of reading. Besides, the materials selected and the ways of training should be various and attractive so that the students are willing to participate in the reading activity. The teachers should know exactly about the students’ reading activity so that they can regulate and improve when necessary. In order to make the students confident and determined, teachers should provide the students more opportunities to simulate the real NMET by giving proper and regular reading training.
Conclusion
In a word, reading teaching occupies the whole of English study in senior high schools. The English teacher has responsibility to help the students gain capacity for reading comprehension. Reading training is a means for English teaching. Strengthening reading capability is the aim of teaching in senior high schools. Capacities for writing, listening and speaking will be improved with the improvement of reading ability. At the same time, the English teacher is just like an officer who is in charge of command. So the teacher needs to be enthusiastic, needs to be professional and surely needs to be flexible in the complex process of teaching. After that the students’ integrated abilities will be surely promoted.
Bibliography
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