Strategies for Improving Students’ Reading Ability.doc

Strategies for Improving Students Reading AbilityAbstract:With the Information Ages arrival,English is widely used as a global language nowadays.Reading,as one of the fourth basic skills of English,the convenient way to get the information,it plays a very important role in the process of English learning,but,students have difficulties in reading.This paper mainly analyzes some reading habits of middle school students which show that there are many obstacles in English reading,such as vocabulary,grammar,as well as background knowledge.Thus,fostering a good English reading habit is essential for students.And being able to adopt different reading skills,Reading methods and strategies for different reading materials and purposes will also help the students read more effectively.Key words: English reading; reading ability; reading habits，reading strategies，reading methods 摘要 ：伴随着信息时代的到来，英语已成为一种全球性的通用语言。阅读作为学习英语语言四大基本技能之一，也作为一种最便捷的接受信息的途径，在英语的学习过程中起着重大的作用。但是，学生们发现阅读是一件比较困难的事。本文通过对一些中学生阅读习惯的分析阐明了它所存在的问题，比如语法，词汇及背景知识方面的缺失。因此让学生形成一种良好的阅读习惯是很重要的，同时应采用不同的阅读技巧、阅读方法、阅读策略以此来应对不同的阅读材料、阅读目标，给学生带来高效的阅读。关键字：英语阅读 英语能力 阅读习惯 阅读策略 阅读方法Strategies for Improving Middle SchoolStudents Reading Ability1 IntroductionWith the opening UP of China,English teaching has been getting more and more attention and English is widely used as a global language, People are enthusiastic about learning English. With the development of our society, we are in an area of information explosion. Reading,the convenient way to get the information, is very important in our modern society. But they have difficulty in understanding the long sentences, or sentences with complicated structures. Reading is one of the fourth basic skills of English, it plays a very important role in the process of English learning. So many students have to spend much time in reading a large number of reading materials in class as well as outside class. Although they have made many efforts for it, however, the situation of students reading ability is far from being satisfactory. There-fore, how to improve reading ability draws more and more attentions. So in the process of reading, we should adopt necessary strategies to overcome the effect of the ill factors in order to raise the students' reading ability to the full. This paper analyzes the present situation of improving students reading abilities till now, and at the same time, it will discuss some reading skills, reading methods and reading strategies to help students to improve their reading ability.2 Some poor methods of students in readingWith the development of the times, society and technology rapidly increasing amount of information, reading play an important role in peoples live. Reading is one of the more rapid means for people to obtain intelligence information.But According to the research,in reading technique, there are some bad habits among the students we need to treat cautiously some of these faults.2.1 Reading word by wordWhatever they read, most of them read in a same way, word by word, sentence by sentence, it is not only waste our time, but also waste our energy. We should read in groups rather than in single word. Reading clusters can make it possible to improve students reading speed and reading comprehension. Clustering trains the students to look at group words instead of one word at a time. 2.2 VocalizingReaders should not outwardly vocalize the words they read but pronounce then just below the threshold of visibility. The harm full thing about this way of reading is that the reader is forced to read at the speed his lips mouth the words. This means that he can read only as fast as he can speak, and this is a slow rate indeed. He is word-to-word style cuts his potential comprehension in half.Fortunately such a defective form of reading is not difficult to cure.First the reader should read something interesting. Such interesting material will force his eyes to move at top time speed. Then, while reading,the reader place two fingers in his mouth,preventing the motion of his tongue or of his lips.Another technique for the reader is to force his tongue tightly up against the roof of his mouth and keep it in this position while reading. Should You Vocalize Words? Yes, although it is faster to form words in your mind rather than on your lips or throat.Eye motion is also important. Frequent backtracking slows you down considerably. 2.3Dictionary dependentFor most of the students, reading is one of the most difficult skills, because their vocabulary is very limit-ed. So many students are becoming dictionary dependant, once they meet a new word they turn to the dictionary immediately, which slows down the reading speed and becomes a barrier in comprehending the text continuously. So the students who have this bad habit must free themselves from dependence on a dictionary. And the ability of using a dictionary properly should aid for independent learning. And，students should be guided at the beginning in using a dictionary .We know dictionary contain much more information about each word, it has many advantages for middle school students by making meaning immediately accessible. However, students need to be told that they should not try to look up every word they do not know There is no doubt that you should read easily and interesting books to improve reading. But when you read dif-ficult words or passages, you should not need a dictionary to read or understand the words. If you need a dicti-onary, you will spend too much time in reading a passage. Thats a stupid way. We can use context clues for w-ord meaning, because the writer always gives you some clues to the meaning for the new words. The meaning of many words will be clear from the words or sentence before or after the words. They should learn to guess the word from how its structure is organized and infer from the text. It is unlikely that you will understand 100 percent of the vocabulary in a text, especially at a first reading. To use the context and then your own knowledge of the subject to help you guess the meaning of unknown words. At your first reading of a text it is usually best not to stop and consult your dictionary. This will interrupt your process of reading and understanding. Often the meaning of unfamiliar words and phrases becomes clear as you continue to read through the text. The dictionary can be used at a later stage. 2.4 Read backRead back is an effective teaching method. Whether the reform of language teaching, how to read back is essential. In classical teaching, only strengthen the reading back, to make students "have a more abundant accumulation of form a good sense of the phrase "that can really" comprehensively improve their language literacy of the tendencies most detrimental to smooth reading is the movement of the eye back to words and phrases that have already once been read. This looking back movement is known as regression. The regressive readers always feel that they just missed something important. They are insure of himself, never certaining what they have read, always going back a few words to make sure, thus wasting much of his time rereading what they have missed. Their comprehensive level is low because their rhythm of reading is broken by the constant interruption of regressions. The way to solve the problem is simply, that practice without regressing but forcing yourself to go on the reading. The materials you choose should be easy. After some time, you may then be used to the reading without regression. However, in any case, students should know that difficult material may positive lyre quire regressions, so they should not be afraid of regress when the aim is to comprehend rather than speed.3 Some good methods of students in readingBad habit of reading will slow down the reading speed .A good reader should develop a correct method of reading. That is to train him self to read attentively and silently, sentence by sentence, not word by word. Whenever meeting a new word, try to guess the meaning from the context. Consulting the dictionary from time to time not only affects ones reading speed and the comprehension of the reading material, but also gets the reader frustrated. Thus, forming a good English reading habit is essential for students. And being able to adopt different reading skills for different reading materials and purposes will also help the students read more effective. 1. Read silently rather than read aloud 2. Have a clear purpose in reading 3. Read phrase by phrase, rather than word by word 4. Concentrate on the important bits, skin the rest, and skip the insignificant parts 5. Use different speeds and strategies for different reading task 6. Perceive the information in the target language rather than mentally translate 7. Guess the meaning of new words from the context or ignore them 8. Have and use background information to help understand the text4 Strategies for improving students reading ability Reading is a very complicated cognitive process, for reading ability is determined by the intelligent activity.4.1 Focusing on basic knowledge 4.1.1Expand the VocabularyVocabulary is the foundation of language, and every reading material is made up of a number of words formed in grammatical rules. All of us began reading in our first language at a very age and we all have experience of being influenced by certain authors or particular books. but we often find vocabulary is the main obstacle in learning to read and this has already been pointed out by Grabe (1988:63), a second language reading expert, who believes that the lack of such vocabulary may be the greatest single impediment of fluent reading? so building a large vocabulary will help you to read more effectively and rapidly. The best way to improve your vocabulary is to use a dictionary regularly. You might carry around a pocket dictionary and use it to look up new words. Or, you can keep a list of words to look up at the end of the day. Concentrate on root prefixes and endings. But you can build your vocabulary without using a dictionary each time, here are two rules:1 Pause for a moment on each new word in your mind 2 Try to guess what the word means from context, from the words around it.What happens with this method is that you will see the word again and again. Each time you will have a stronger impression of the meaning soon, the new word will be familiar and its meaning clear. Of course it needs persistence, or reading will hardly go on generally the large vocabulary you get the fewer obstacles you meet. 4. 1. 2 Proficiency in GrammarIn grammar the problems are also severe and which form a bigger hinder. We know Language is composed of words and grammatical structures. Often we can find that some learners recite a large number of words and they can say the meaning of them as they see them, but when these words are arranged into a sentence, these learners cannot make sense of them. Why? That is because they are not familiar with grammar. Grammar is the skeleton, which produces the variety of different words combination. So mastering grammar is the basic step to make progress in English reading. English grammar, can have their proficiency in English grammar applied to English reading practice, which is to improve reading comprehension must have basic skills. Such as encountered in reading the sentences difficult to understand, to connect with grammar, proper analysis of the sentence, to find out the relationship between the various parts, so an accurate understanding of sentence meaning. 4.1.3 Understand the Background knowledgeAs we all know，we all have experiences of reading something which does not contain any new word or new structure, but we still find it difficult to understand its meaning. The reason is that reading comprehension is constituted by simple-and-easy word and structure comprehension and difficult background comprehension. In other words, when we read, maybe we know each of words or structures. But we dont know what the sentence means because of lack of background knowledge. If we master the grammar and word knowledge, we can only understand the word meaning. Because different countries have different cultural practices and customs wind. Articles used in the examination is often the original foreign materials, if you do not understand the cultural background of each country, often to bring a set of difficult to read. if you want to become a good reader, Enriching and enlarging the background knowledge are the keys to understanding the text. In a word, we should realize that the thoughts and point of view of different nationalities, different types of societies about the nature and human society are quite different and it is evidently wrong to understand foreign language in the same way as our mother tongue. 4.2 Mastering reading skillsFor the purpose of developing students reading ability efficiently, the students also need the following strategic skills.4.2.1 Prediction Predicting is an important reading skill. Before you read a text in detail, it is possible to predict what information you may find in it. You will probably have some knowledge of the subject already, and you can use this knowledge to help you anticipate what a reading text contains. After looking at the title, for example, you can ask yourself what you know and do not know about the subject before you read the text. Having made predictions based on the title, students can be asked to predict some lexical items that they think are likely to occur in the text. Then the students read the text to confirm their predictions. Or you can formulate questions that you would like to have answered by reading the text. These exercises will help you focus more effectively on the ideas in a text when you actually start reading4.2.2Setting the sceneSetting the scene is the second type of pre-reading activity. It means getting the students familiarized with the cultural and social background knowledge relevant to the reading text. We can set the scene by relating what students already know to what they want to know. For example, we can ask the students to write down three things that they would like to know concerning the theme of a text they are about to read. Then ask the students to read the article to see if they can find what they want to know. Another way is to use visual aids whenever possible to set the scene. This may range from real objects, to pictures. Photos, map , drawings as well as videos episodes and multi-media materials, etc. Therefore, before reading a text, it's important for you to predict, what you expect to see in the text. Then you become more involved in reading in order to confirm your expectations about the information that you think the text will contain. You pre