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如何提高大学生的英语阅读能力(1)

2013-10-31 01:52

[Abstract] The paper aims at how to improve college students` English reading abilities. Reading is a basic ability in learning English. Through investigations, the writer finds that there are some obstacles to hinder college students from improving their abilities in reading comprehension in the process of reading. First, the paper discusses the reasons for improving college students` reading abilities: one is that students read in different ways for different purposes and the other is that students read for meanings. Second, combining with the two reasons and psychological mechanisms and cognitive process in English reading, it analyzes the factors of hindering the improvement of college students` reading abilities, that is, teachers` teaching methods and students` characteristics. Then, according to these factors, it gives solutions to getting rid of obstacles in English reading, such as emphasizing on the cultural background knowledge, the influence of discourse and the acquisition of lexicon. Finally, it mentions that teachers should pay attention to the training of reading skills in English teaching to help college students to master reading skills and improve their reading abilities.
[Key Words] college students; reading abilities; reading comprehension; obstacles

【摘 要】 本文旨在如何提高大学生的英语阅读能力。阅读是学习英语的一种基本能力。通过调查，笔者发现学生在阅读过程中存在一些阻碍他们提高英语阅读能力的障碍。针对这一问题，本文首先谈论提高大学生阅读能力的两个原因：一方面，学生处于不同的目的采用不同的方式进行阅读；另一方面，学生在进行阅读是能够读懂文章的意思；其次，文章结合着两方面的原因和阅读的心理机制和认知过程，分析了阻碍大学生英语阅读能力提高的因素：教师的教学方法和学生自身的特点；接着根据这些因素，文章提出克服这些障碍的解决方法，比如，重视文化背景知识，重视语篇的影响，重视词汇的习得等等；最后文章提到老师应该注意阅读技巧的训练，帮助学生掌握阅读技巧，提高英语阅读能力.

（转载自中国科教评价网http://www.nseac.com）

【关键词】 大学生；阅读能力；阅读理解；障碍
 

1 Introduction
Reading is a basic ability in learning English. Without reading, our society couldn’t make progress .Nowadays, we are in the process of economic integration and globalization. Globalization strengthens global economy, politics, culture, society, science and technology linkages. In such a macro-background, people pay more and more attention to English learning and have higher and higher requirements of reading comprehension.
The aim of English teaching in college is to develop college students` ability of reading professional and original books. Therefore, besides listening, speaking, writing, translating and other aspects of skills, we should also focus on developing students` abilities in reading comprehension .Such kind of abilities mean that individuals understand the meaning that the author wants to express. And it is also a complicated thinking activity in the core of understanding.
“Current models of the reading process focus on the interactive relation of reader and text. From this perspective, reading is understood to be a complex cognitive process in which reader and text interact to (re)create meaningful discourse.”[1]Px Reading is valued not only as an educational tool, but as a source of enjoyment.
Therefore, this paper proposes to analyze the factors that influence the improvement of college students` abilities in reading comprehension, and help students to overcome obstacles in the process of reading and master some reading skills to improve their reading abilities. 

2 Reasons for improving their reading abilities
There are two reasons for improving their reading abilities.
First, students read in different ways for different purposes. Christine Nuttall has pointed out that college students couldn’t just read text books in their daily life. They will read various materials, such as novel, fiction, poetry, telephone directory, statistics, label on medicine leaflet, notice, and application form. They should know why they read each one, what they want to get from it, and how they read it. When they read each item, they need to use different kinds of reading skills. Do they read a telephone directory the same way as a poem? How about a timetable or a notice? Reading these is very different from reading a book. The way they deal with each text is strongly influenced by the purpose in reading. Quickly scanning a street map to find a place where they want to go is very different from reading a legal document. They will soon realize big differences in the reading speed they use.

Second, students read for meanings. Whatever their reasons for reading (excluding any reading for language learning), it is not very likely that they read just for pronunciations, grammatical structures, syntax, words. They read because they want to get something from the writing. They want to understand what the writer wants to tell them. An article can not only give us some facts, but also be enjoyment, ideas and feelings. No matter what it is, while they read, they want to get messages that the writer intended. They are interested in what the writing meant.
It is obvious that improving reading ability is very important if they want to be proficient readers.

3 Psychological mechanisms and cognitive process in English reading
Reading is a complex intellectual activity which is affected by many factors. In Psycholinguistics (New Edition), Gui Shichun has pointed out that reading comprehension which is consistent with language comprehension that is a complicated and general comprehension is a complicated psycholinguistic process. It is an interactive process between the reader and the text. He believes that the relation between reading and intellect are extremely close. Foreign language learners with good intellect can obtain more information in the process of reading. For reading is a very important way to acquire knowledge and develop intellectual emotion and it is a psychological activity. [2]P91-116
When students are reading, many body organs, such as brain, eyes, nose, participate in the activity. In particular, the brain directly controls eye movement, lets readers identify language and reprocesses the acquired information. Chen Meimei, Rao Hui, Zhang Xicheng, Zhang Jun has pointed out that the research and development of reading psychology shows that it is unnecessary to speak or hear every word if students want to understand the meaning of a text. It is completely possible that they can directly understand its meaning while they read a text. [3]P72 Efficient reading can achieve understanding. It means that students don’t need to understand a text through words to sound and even don’t need to read a text word by word to understand it. Therefore, those students can directly understand a text meaning through silent reading which is very important in English reading ability.

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Moreover, in the process of reading comprehension, not only the linguistic knowledge which is generated through reading words plays an important role, but also the background knowledge which is provided by the brain also plays a great potential role. Background knowledge includes students` background knowledge of English speaking countries` society and culture, individual experiences, logical knowledge and the self-cultivation of language knowledge and so on. Experiments have shown that if some letters which are not associated with each other, are put together; the brain can only identify about four or five words immediately, or even a meaningful sentence. Thus, we can know that the more background knowledge, the better and faster one comprehends. And then there will be less difficult in reading, and the reading speed will be faster.
Christine Nuttall has pointed out that English reading comprehension is regarded as a cognitive activity which process information from written words. In general, there are two ways: one is the bottom-up processing; the other is the top-down processing. “In bottom-up processing, the readers build up a meaning from the black marks on the page recognizing letters and words, working out sentence structure. We can make conscious use of it when an initial reading leaves us confused. Perhaps we cannot believe that the apparent message was really what the writer intended; this can happen if our world knowledge is inadequate, or if the writer’s point of view is very different from our own. In that case, we must scrutinize the vocabulary and syntax to make sure we have grasped the plain sense correctly. Thus bottom-up processing can be used as a corrective to ‘tunnel vision’(seeing things from our own limited point of view).In top-down processing, we draw on our own intelligence and experience---the predictions we can make, based on the schemata we have acquired---to understand the text. As we saw, this kind of processing is used when we interpret assumptions and draw inferences. We make conscious use of it when we try to see the overall purpose of the text, or get a rough idea of the pattern of the writer’s argument, in order to make a reasoned guess at the next step (on the grounds that having an idea of what sth might mean can be a great help in interpreting it)” [4]P16-17 （转载自http://zw.NSEAC.com科教作文网）
Actually, in the process of reading comprehension, both of them are always used at the same time or staggered. And they are become known as interaction. Although, logically, we might expect that we ought to understand the plain sense if we are to understand anything else, in fact a student continually shifts from one focus to another, now adopting a top-down approach to predict the probable meaning, then moving to the bottom-up approach to check whether that is really what the writer want to tell. Christine Nuttall calls it interactive reading. [4]P11 Both are important strategies for students. No matter what kind of activities, they have common requirements. In reading, students need not only solid language knowledge of vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, but also abundant social and cultural background knowledge and certain logical analysis ability. This is an important principal to cultivate students` abilities in English reading.

4 Factors of hindering the improvement of college students` reading abilities
Based on the above statements, it is not very difficult to find that English reading comprehension is a highly active and creative act. Christine Nuttall says reading is a process in which readers select, classify and interpret information according to experience, information and knowledge they have in their minds .Reading is a communicative activity between writer and reader in written form. (So, according to this view, we can make a conclusion that reading is an interactive process—as conversation is—because both reader and writer depend on one another.) [4]P11In the past, in English reading teaching classes, teachers only emphasized on the training of language skills to enable students to understand the language structure units which is only limited to words` or sentences` understanding. They completely neglected cultivating students` abilities in reading comprehension.
From the book written by Chen Meimei and the other three people, some conclusions can be drawn that there are several obvious characteristics in college students` learning in English reading: first, their purposes of learning are clear. Their learning motivation is greater. They have plenty of social and life experience and a certain cultural knowledge; second, the acquisitions of native language have for a long time. Their thinking is basically mature. And they have stronger understanding abilities, thinking abilities, logical judgments and reasoning abilities; third, they learn foreign language in the environment of native language, not in the environment of target language. They acquire English and develop their abilities just depending on limited time in teaching class; fourth, their study methods are not correct enough, and levels of their knowledge of English are different; fifth, as they grow, their language acquisition device in their brains gradually decline. All these characteristics affect college students` reading comprehension.

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Therefore, some research has been done through interview and questionnaires with 30 junior students from English department and a certain number of students in other departments. The main contents are about problems and obstacles they meet in the process of reading and how they deal with new words that they really stand in the way of comprehension.73.3%of students reflect the breadth of vocabulary knowledge affects their reading comprehension, such as small breadth of vocabulary knowledge, different understanding of polysemy.46.7% of them reflect that they will lose patient when they meet some difficult and complicated problems.46.7% of them reflect that background knowledge affects the percentage of the right answers.23.3% of them feel that there is not enough time to think because of reading speed.
According to the above research results and Chen Meimei and the other three people` ideas, I find that there are some obstacles which affect the improvement of college students` reading abilities:
(1)Native language interference causes negative transfer, including phonetics interference, lexicon interference, grammar interference and pragmatics interference and so on;
(2)Intralingual interference causes the confusion of the text structure, including overgeneralization, incomplete application of rules and cross-association, etc.
(3)Non-linguistic interference causes the behavior error, including the attitudes toward errors and awareness of self-amendment and so on. [3]P74-75

5 Solutions to getting rid of obstacles in English reading
Based on what have been discussed, it is impossible to improve college students` reading abilities unless they overcome obstacles mentioned above according to college students` own characteristics.

5.1 Emphasis on the cultural background knowledge
For a long time, people have been working on how the cultural element affects learning of English. Anthropologists and linguists regard knowledge of cultural background and language structure as the key items. Students often ignore English culture and lack background knowledge. They have very little or even no knowledge about English speaking countries` culture. “Therefore, they could not understand or they could misunderstand some idioms. At last it will hinder them from improving reading comprehension and reading abilities.” [5]P84 “The background knowledge is a vital factor to affect college students` abilities in reading comprehension.” [6]P93

（转载自http://zw.ＮＳＥaＣ.com科教作文网）

The studies of languages and culture indicate that language is formed and keeps developing and getting nourished gradually in the long-term social practices and real life. Language and culture are inseparable. Culture is generally defined as the total-material riches and spiritual wealth created in the process of social development. [7]P101
So language and culture are interdependent and interacted. Language is the medium of culture transmitting. Without language, culture would not be possible. In the process of English reading, even though students master basic knowledge, they will inevitably make some mistake and meet some difficulties in understanding if they lack understanding of English cultural features and ignore the cultural differences between native language and target language. So, when college students learn foreign language, they should remember that learning its culture; background is not only helpful to our understanding of it but also inevitable to master it. “For instance, when we know the origin of Thanksgiving Day, we`ll have no difficulty in understanding their way of celebration with a turkey, and if we know the earlier settlers from Europe on American Continent, we’ll find no problem of understanding the common American characteristics---seeking for freedom and individuality, etc.” [7]P101
In addition, it is necessary to pay special attention to college students mastering cultural meanings of lexicon connotation and denotation. Even though some words in different languages have the same concept, their social and cultural meanings are with strong ethnic features because of different culture in different countries. For example:
They were carrying sandwiches and wine in paper bags, dreaming of golden beaches and sea tides as the pray, cold spring of New York vanished behind them.
If students can not understand the climate in New York and Florida and their geographical location and so on, it is impossible for them to understand why the spring in New York is grey and cold, why they dream golden beaches and sea tides. And, of course, they can not comprehend their good mood and the hero`s gloomy mood, which will help students to understand the rest of the passage.

（转载自http://zw.NSEAC.com科教作文网）

In a word, culture and language are closely related to each other. In teaching, teachers should emphasize both of them, teach both and mix both. “As one way of communication, reading materials reflect cultural differences through the language in written form.” [8]P62 Therefore, students must realize the importance of cultural background knowledge. Only in this way can college students improve their language competence and achieve effective reading.

5.2 Emphasis on the influence of discourse
Strictly speaking, a text could consist of a single sentence, but we are more interested in texts composed of a number of sentences organized to carry a coherently structured message. “The message may be a story, a body of information, an argument and so on; and the way the meanings in a text are organized to convey the message is discourse.” [9]P80 So, to break through the traditional modes of teaching reading, college students should pay more attention to the understanding of the discourse as well as the understanding of words and sentences. They should use discourse analysis to analyze the communicative function of a discourse, the contexture and the logical relation between paragraphs to grasp writer’s meanings.
What does discourse analysis mean? It is the study of how discourse is produced and organized. Discourse analysis can help readers to obtain and master lots of information which is conveyed by a discourse, and scientifically and systematically analyze the contexture, passage meanings and the relation between sentence and sentence and paragraph and paragraph. Take argumentation as an example. Chen Meimei, Rao Hui, Zhang Xicheng, Zhang Jun has pointed out that about 80% to 95% of paragraphs in an argumentation contain topic sentences to express their main ideas according to statistical data. It usually appears in the first sentence or the last sentence of a paragraph. Of course, sometimes, it may be in the middle of a paragraph.

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