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论使用青少年文学作为第二英语课堂的阅读材料

2017-02-03 01:07 [Abstract] Reading is an important part in language learning. But now the present situation existing in senior middle school is not satisfied. Students’ purpose of reading literature is only to finish the work given by teachers or pass exam. When they finish these work, they stopped reading. In this paper, the author introduces Young Adult Literature to readers. Young Adult Literature meets the interest and need of these young people in senior school who are experiencing rapid physical, intellectual, moral and reading development. Consulting the study or research or experiments in this field done by scholars who are both domestic and abroad, the author promote a series teaching activities such as outside reading, outside interesting groups to develop students’ reading ability and interest.
[Key Word] Reading interesting; reading material; literature reading; young adult literature; adolescence
[摘要] 当前中学所普遍存在的英语文学阅读状况是:学生阅读是为了完成老师布置的任务和应付考试。当阅读满足他们的这些任务后,他们的课外阅读行为就停止。本文针对这种现象作了具体的原因分析,指出在国内大部分中学英语教学中,阅读材料是影响学生进行英语文学阅读的一个重要原因。回顾国外学者在这领域所做的理论和实践研究，提出把青少年文学的特点和中学生所处发展时期的各方面的需求结合加以分析,采用把青少年文学作为课外阅读材料这一教学方法。我们通过一系列的教学活动如课外兴趣小组，课外阅读活动，阅读作业，培养和提高中学生英语学习能力和文学阅读兴趣。作者对为什么以及如何运用青少年文学读物作为新型课外阅读材料以培养学生的兴趣和情感进行初步的讨论, 以此引发更多的讨论。
[关键词] 阅读兴趣;阅读材料;文学阅读;青少年文学;青少年时期 1. IntroductionAs a rule, the teaching of reading in senior schools, both public and private, will move in one of two directions: up or down. When effectively taught, the study of reading can be the most exciting event of the adolescent student’s day. Young people can become deeply engrossed in what they read. They can respond with intensity and conviction. Interests as factors in genuinely productive reading study are slippery elements indeed. Inventories provided to students in an attempt to discover what they prefer in reading materials can be, and often are, faked by the inventory takers. Thus, the discrepancy between what some young people claim they enjoy reading and what they will actually interact with can be a significant one. Furthermore, teachers must be ever mindful of the differences between their interest, taste, and enthusiasms for certain material selections and those of their students.How about the situation of reading in senior schools in China? Most students are lack of interest and motivations in reading. The purpose of their reading is to pass the exam. As a result, the students do a little reading outside lessons. Why did these problems exsist?2. Interest in Reading
In leading young people toward increased reading awareness, teachers used to consider the nature and extent of the interest factor on those efforts. Interesting are a two-edged sword. When positive, they can enhance teachers’ efforts to involve their students in the concern with reading materials and do so most significantly. When negative, however, they present a formidable obstacle to meaningful transaction taking place between texts and readers.2.1The Status of Reading in senior Middle SchoolThis is an accurate picture of the reading programs in many middle and secondary schools that still have students move chronologically through the literature anthology and choose the traditional classics as their outside reading. Most students are simply unable to connect the text with their goals, level of development and experience. Language development affects cognitive development and vice versa students at this age read at a much higher level of ability when they are reading something that matches their developmental interests and goals. Most students cannot read classic literature well [i.e, they cannot have personal involvement with it]. Students think of the literature as something they cannot understand; therefore, they think they are not intelligent individuals.‘‘The result of the survey about the status of reading which were done by John S. Simmons reflected that Middle school and high school students often balk at display of overt enthusiasm for the selections they are asked to read in the class precisely because they are adolescents. To many of them, the fact that a work is on the required list means that it simply cannot be interesting. They will doggedly refrain from any display of enthusiastic or appreciate response despite the teachers ’creative efforts or the actual effect the work has had on them. ‘Boring’ become the operative judgment. In reading that categorical implacable judgment, they retain their cool demeanor, on which they value above all else. When faced with such study they often have melodramatic indifference.’’[1]p(20)It seems that school have accomplished just the opposite of what they intended to do. They have turned students off from reading rather than made them lifelong readers. Teachers have failed to choose reading materials that enable students to become emotionally and cognitively involved in what they read. If students are asked to read literature that is not consistent with their development tasks, they will not be able to interact fully with that literature. As a result, students who do not interact with the literature are left with leaning only about literature.“The same problems also exist in most senior schools in China. Students’ purpose of reading is only to finish the work given by teachers or pass exam. When they finish their work, they stopping reading, for they are asked to read the traditional classics that are chosen in order to complete the teaching mission. But the classics are written in a style and with syntax and vocabulary that are often quite foreign to students in senior middle school. So most students think of literature as something that is difficult for them’’.[2] I have talked to some teachers and students in senior middle school. I have found that most students appeal that their reading materials are difficult and not suitable for them. They can understand the meaning well. So they don’t like to read.2.2 Factors That Affect Interest in Reading“The key factor to determine reading is choosing suitable reading material to students. Obviously, there will be many students who will turn away from the task of studying literature because of inadequate competence in the necessary reading skill. Metaphoric expressions, for example, abound in all literary works, whether they are fictional, poetic, or dramatic. Such expressions are placed in those works to clarity indeed intensity, the meanings those works. When students are unable to establish precise relationships between metaphors and their referents, however, what was put there to clarity produces confusion instead. It doesn’t take many such experiences in missed communication to discourage or vex less able readers. Given the additional problem of these students’ probably limited attention spans, the options of giving up selection which is metaphoric are often the one taken. Even though the classics literature may speak to the universal human condition, young people have trouble relating because they have not experienced many of those human condition. At the same time, some links need to be established between that ability and the interest. Interest in reading fluctuates widely before the age of sixteen, an age at which many students begin to think seriously about choices affecting their future: college, military service, industrial careers, dropping out of the academic scene altogether, and so forth. For most young people, interest in reading usually peaks between the age of twelve and fourteen. It is a period of intense, prolonged introspection in which the desire to raise and organize problems about self is at its height. It is a kind of limbo between a lost childhood and approaching adulthood. People at this age tend to be more interested in being alone with their lives. For some, reading fictions, especially novels which delve into the teenage experience, can be a source of comfort, challenge, stimulation, and escape. Young adult literature focuses on the nature and availability of literature with which youngsters at that difficult stage of their lives can identify.”[3]John S. Simmons point out “People in these years are also capable of, and often involved in, deeper reflection that centers on abstract concepts: love, loyalty, fear, justice, betrayal, and the like. Obviously, their reading can feed this preoccupation, but the fare must be nourishing. In short, abstract thinking may contain a profound concern with interpersonal relationships, and reading can provide countless opportunities for them to view their problems from the detached prism of fiction.’’[4](p75)‘‘Some of these interpersonal problems will be quite obvious. Some mention of them should be made.1) Problems related to communication with younger siblings, partially stemming from thirteen-year-olds’ desire that the ‘‘little people’’ regard them as adult-and these younger children’s irritating reluctance to cooperate;2) Problems related to the conflicting need to be accepted into a peer group;3) Problems which reside in thirteen-year-olds’ ambivalence toward members of the opposite sex (i.e, culture and peer pressure, clash with hormones). The gap between girls’ and boys’ relative immaturity exacerbates this greatly.In all of the above, imaginative literature can become a source of excitement, revelation, guidance, and solace. Teachers as guidance counselors can be of great personal assistance to adolescents in their struggles. The movement of middle school curricula toward an emphasis on the personal and social identities of early adolescents, rather than on the cultural heritage into which they will someday be assimilated, provides a whole new niche for literature to occupy, one in which its relevance to the nature of the early teenage years can be maximized.’’[5](p75-76)3. The Possibility and Practicality of Using Young Adult Literature as Reading Materials for Outside ReadingTeachers in senior middle school are usually responsible for introducing the study of literature to their students: Young Adult Literature can serve as an excellent vehicle for such an introduction. Teachers in senior middle school who deal with students of lower ability, non-academic motivations, and limited cultural backgrounds should also consider the use of Young Adult Literature to provide insight into the nature of literature study for those individuals. Young Adult Literature seems to offer an abundant and valuable resource to teachers who want to guide their students through this transition.3.1 The Character of Young Adult Literature Donelson and Nilsen offer the definition of Young Adult Literature:‘‘ any book freely choose for reading by some one in this age group’’.[6]p(2) Later it was defined as ‘literature written or marketed primarily for teenagers; Books to whose main characters the teenagers can personally relate; stories with an uncomplicated, often single plot line; books with plot that address the concerns of the young adults; literature that attracts a young adult readership’[7]p(2) Compared with the definition offered by Nilsen and Donelson, this definition is more specific and comprehensive. In recent years, Young Adult Literature is also considered as ‘books written for adult, about young adult and liked by young adults’ and more and more teachers prefer to match young adult books with classics bearing similar themes; thus, the genre of Young Adult Literature is further expanded.As a reading material, young adult literature has many common characteristics: conflicts are often consisted with the young adult’s experience, themes are of interest to young people, protagonists and most characters are young adults, and language parallels that of young people. It is simply written in a natural, flowing language much like the way in which the young adults speak. Young adult literature is usually shorter. The young adult can finish in a comparatively short time without feeling tired and bored. This will guarantee an engaged and efficient reading. And Young Adult Literature is graded reading materials meeting young people’s different level intellectual development.3.1.1 Young adult’s emotional development‘‘Adolescence and preadolescence are difficult, unsettled periods for young people. They are no longer children. They are no yet adults. It is a time of change: a time for physical growth, sexual awareness, emotional and cognitive development. As young people move through these experiences or stages, they seem to be so alone in their struggle. But few of young people asked their parents and other adults to help them through their difficult period in their lives. Reading books helps young adults in their journey –their rites of passage—into adulthood. Books provide experiences that may help young adults through their adolescent years. Providing young people with Young Adult Literature not only in the bookstores but also in the class is imperative if we want adolescents to read about more experiences than they could have on their own. In addition, this literature serves young people in their struggle with identity, with their relationships with adults, and with their choices, which often suggest their concern with moral questions of right and wrong.’[8](p25)3.2 Effective and Positive Influence‘‘Young adult literature provides enjoyment, satisfaction and literary quality while it brings life and hope and reality to young people. The wide range of topics in Young Adult Literature such as friendship, death, divorce, alienation, sibling rivalry, peer cruelty, racism, hostility and egocentricity, even struggle, conflict and feeling of the futility and hopelessness of life dramatize life in unfamiliar environments as experienced by characters of the learner’s own age. And therefore stimulate learners in encouraging self-expression and idea exploration. In this way, literature enlarges the students’ knowledge and understanding of human behavior for it exhibits thoughts and feelings which are often concealed in real life. Students, on the other hand, bring their unique life experience and world look when coming to read a text in class. Their confirming, revising or refuting the original outlook after confronting the writer’s view enable them to come up with a new understanding of the world .Then they will share their readings with their peers and teachers and reshape their understanding if needed. This aesthetic stance of reading is quite different from the traditional way of reading in that the former allows readers to have a virtual experience, living in the story world, connecting with characters, being emotionally involved while the latter focuses on looking for facts defined by Rosenblatt as ‘efferent reading’ which actually prevents learner from achieving the power of English expression.共2页: 1 [2] 下一页 论文出处(作者):