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浅谈大学英语阅读技巧(1)

2017-08-23 01:24 [Abstract] Reading is one of the four important skills in English as a second or foreign language. It is also a skill that the students need to possess to support independent and self-directed learning. With the Information Age’s arrival, the English materials gradually change from paper materials to electronic ones. So, it becomes more and more important for English majors to speed up their reading in order to acquire as much information as possible. Thus, fostering 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 effectively. The paper mainly concerns some English reading skills and discusses how to foster good English reading habits for college students.
[Key Words] characteristics; English reading; make notes; foster the English reading habits 【摘 要】阅读是学习第二外语的必须掌握的四项基本技能之一，也是大学生用于自学须掌握的学习策略和技巧。随着信息时代的到来，英语阅读材料渐渐由传统的纸质材料向电子读物转变，提高英语专业学生的阅读速度尽可能多的获取信息变的越来越重要。因此学生有必要养成良好的英语阅读习惯。学生能对不同的英语阅读材料和不同的阅读目的采用不同的阅读方法，也将有助于他们更加有效的阅读。本文主要叙述一些与大学生相关的英语阅读技巧，并且讨论了如何养成良好的英语阅读习惯。
【关键词】 特点；英语阅读；做笔记；培养英语阅读习惯1. Introduction As reading is a part of academic literacy, English teachers usually have high expectations of a student's ability to cope with the demands of reading in English. Most college students wish to read more books. Reading is a way for college students to be more knowledgeable and successful. However, it is also an activity that many college students don’t enjoy very much. To succeed at schools, students need to possess a range of strategies and skills that support self-directed learning. Traditionally, many of these strategies and skills, some of which are highly generic, are not explicitly taught to students in the expectation that students either already have these skills, or will naturally acquire and develop these skills in their course of study. In order to improve the college students’ ability of English reading, we should answer the following questions: What are the English reading habits of students? How to become an effective reader? How to foster the English reading habits? 2. The characteristics of college students With the development of society, science and technology develop at high speed and the competition in the society become sharp. Studies in the past have shown that the exam-oriented educational system promotes rote learning, and so that there needs to be a paradigm shift in how the college students view education and about the way they learn. Most college students read English materials only to pass exams and do not read for pleasure. However, the situation changes now. In order to become well-learnt people that the society needs, most college students long for extensive English reading, hoping to do preparation for the future job by this way. At the same time, the purposes of college students are to complete the studies and to obtain good results. In order to adapt to the demands of society and school, college students treat seeking knowledge as the first duty. They relate themselves to the society closely, hoping to enrich themselves through reading and become the learned persons who can face the challenges of the society. Therefore, the motivation of the majority of college students is definite. It is also obvious that the English reading materials gradually change from the paper materials to the electronic reading materials. The Internet that opens another window for the college students becomes the most convenient tool for college students to get information. Now the serious problem is that college students can read on some level, but many do not read effectively. In other words, many college students take it for granted that they could understand concepts or lessons by memorizing the English words and information rather than understanding the ideas that are expressed by the words. Consequently, information is retained mainly for the purpose of passing an exam; memorization is mistaken for learning.3. Effective English reading strategies Because a large portion of time at schools is spent on working with written sources, and because there are lots of English materials to be covered in a short amount of time, it is essential that reading behaviors of English majors should be both purposeful and efficient. Reading is talking and discussing with the reader himself, with the author and others. So as the readers, the first thing for the readers do is to accumulate information before reading. To ensure the good results of reading, the college students also need to develop effective reading strategies. Knowing how to read effectively involves accumulating background information before reading, selecting the English materials, understanding the structure of texts, how to read for different purposes, and how to reflect on your reading. 3.1 Accumulating background information before reading‘‘Reading is a receptive language process. It is a psycholinguistic process in that it starts with a linguistic surface representation encoded by a writer and ends with meanings that the reader constructs. There is thus an essential interaction between language and thought in reading. The writer encodes thoughts as language and the reader encodes the language to thought.’’ Reading is not passive but active, and in fact an interactive process that has been recognized for some time in first or native language reading.[1] In the English reading, it is a process that needs not only the college students’ active participation, predication and information processing, but also their prior experience and background knowledge. “Language is a part of culture and also the carrier and the container of culture. Language and culture is closely related, each influencing and shaping the other. To learn a foreign language implies to learn the culture in which it is spoken.”[2] “Reading is a kind of verbal communication. The readers communicate with the author(s) through the text. In this way, culture factors are inherent to the reading act and therefore influence the readers’ control over the input (Byra met al 1994)”. In the reading process, we cannot understand or interpret a text without the influence of our previous social experience and social context in which the reading takes place. The text we read, the topic we are interested in as well as the way we approach are culturally constructed (Kress, 1989).”[3] The cultural factors play an important role in the process of English reading. Some cultural factors cause problems in reading directly so as to confuse college students and hinder their understanding. Other culture misunderstandings may dangle in their mind and prevent them from grasping the real meaning.[4] Culture and language are closely related to each other. As one way of communication, reading English materials reflect cultural differences through the language in written form. The readers should aware the cultural differences and try their best to accumulate background knowledge of all sorts. So the first piece of advice that will be given here is to do as much reading as the students can. College students in the school can make use of the library resources to support their study and self-learning. The kinds of resources include English books, English journal articles, English magazines, etc., as well as a wide range of library services. Now thousands of books, magazines, journal articles and newspapers have electrical versions. It is no doubt that the college students’ task will be much easier if they know some websites they really want to find online. 3.2 Improving your English reading strategies3.2.1 Choice reading Choice reading is very important. Actually it is a process of selecting English materials. The reader should clearly recognize the classification of the English books and should certainly know which type of English book he is reading. It is best if the reader know his purpose of reading before reading starts. It means that the reader should turn his attention to practical goals. To receive the information, the reader can read not only the book title, the subtitle, the table of contents, but also the author's preface, the abstract introduction and the index. These are all the information that authors want to transmit to the reader. According to these clues, the college students can choose different types of English reading materials with the different demands. The college students should also be aware that different reading skills should be adopted when the English reading material are different. 3.2.2 How to select English sources In order to get useful information, the college students had better answer the following two questions: How well those English sources meet the purpose of reading? How reliably the author presents those ideas and information in the book? The college students have better read things they are interested in so that the hard work required for comprehension will seem much more pleasurable．Also，the college students will be much more eager to understand what they are reading，not only as a means to improve their reading comprehension，but also as a means to better understand the interesting subject-matter. The process of selecting an English source includes examining its publisher, its reference and its author(s). Depending on the reader’s purpose of reading, it can also involve assessing timeliness. Some ways of selecting English sources are follows:(i) Pay more attention to the timeliness When a book is published, it always has a special social background. For example, if a reader wants to find some information about computers, he’d better check the materials published after 1940s.(ii) Evaluating the publisher of an English book Experienced readers may have some information about a book’s publisher. He may know the book that is published by an individual, an organization or government agency. Generally speaking, authors and publishers usually have a bias about a particular topic or issue. When the publisher is a scholarly or professional journal, the reader can often gain an understanding of what kinds of articles it publishes by looking over the contents of several issues of the journal or by reading a few of the articles found within it. It is very important for the English majors to know some famous publishers of the English-speaking countries.（iii）Evaluating the relevance of an English book If a reader reads with a definite purpose, such as for a research project, he should have a look at the relevance firstly. Relevance is the extent to which a source provides information that person can use in evaluating the materials. There are several ways to determine whether the information presented in a scholarly or professional journal article is likely to be relevant to the reader’s reading purpose. There are two main strategies to help the reader to determine whether the article is relevant to readers’ needs and interests. An abstract—a brief description of the article and its results—often appears at the beginning of the article. When an abstract is not used, an article's introduction often provides similar information.（iv）Evaluating the author(s) of an English book In order to get a better understanding of a book, the reader had better know the author(s) as much as possible. No matter what kind of book the reader chooses to read, it's important to know its author or authors. “Most scholarly or professional journal articles contain a short biographical note about the author of an article. If these biographical notes have not been included and the reader would like to learn more about them, he might consider searching for each author on the net. An increasing number of authors have created home pages on which they list information about themselves, such as their educational background, professional experience, and interests.”[5]3.3 The process of English reading If the readers face with a difficult and complex English text, or if they do not read effectively under normal circumstances, the readers can improve the way of reading by being more purposeful in the approach to reading. Think of reading as a three-stage process that consists of:(1) Plan for English reading(2) English reading(3) Reflection 3.3.1 Planning for English reading Planning for English reading will help the reader to give the reading a focus. The reader can do preparation of reading by asking the following questions:What does the reader wants to get out of reading this English text? Are there any ideas that should be taken into English reading?Why has this particular English text been selected? Can the English text be subdivided into sections to read? What has skim reading told the reader about the English text? 3.3.2 English reading When a reader reads, the reader is looking at the communication of some kind of meaning in a structure. Since writers choose to organize material in a particular way, the reader needs to be able to see this structure in the text. “In texts ideas are built up from sentence to paragraph to whole text; ideas and concepts tend to be developed from parts or segments to a whole. The uses of reading focus attention on authors as readers, on the use of sources, and on the art of reading as a writer.”[6] Understanding the structure of an English text will help the college students to know how to read it. There are two main aspects of structure.(1) The development of ideas in sentences and paragraphs; (eg, some authors show their main viewpoints in the first or last sentence)(2) The development of the argument. Once a focus has been developed for reading, how the college students read a particular English text depending on the nature and structure of the English text. The following are some useful guiding principles that the student had better keep in mind.(1) Identify the starting point of the writer’s argument - usually this will be found in the first or second paragraph.(2) Remember that English follow rules of grammar. By understanding the rules that govern speech，the reader can eliminate some false conclusions and gain a better understanding of what is being said.(3) See if the reader can detect any assumptions the writer has made, or the start of a particular method of argument.(4) Identify important, or central, ideas (or any stated principles) in paragraphs as the reader reads them. (If there is more than one, try to work out which is the most important or central);(5) Evaluate the evidence that has been presented in support of ideas or principles, and decide whether the evidence is relevant, persuasive, and convincing; (6) Assess whether the conclusions are justified on the basis of the evidence that has been presented. After the reader has read carefully through the English text in full, as suggested above, make some brief notes on:(1) the understanding of the English text; (2) the preliminary response to the ideas and arguments that have been presented. In the process of reading an English essay, the college students should try to read without stopping when meeting unfamiliar words and phrases. The college students can underline the new words and look them up in a dictionary after finishing. If reading is often interrupted, the college students will find that it is very difficult to create an understanding of a whole text. Generally speaking, reading interruption has the opposite effect and even causes the reading to be fragmented. If the college students keep stopping, it might be difficult to create an overview of an article and to remember what they have read. “Actually, guessing the meaning based on the context is a better or more rewarding way. The reader can guess the meaning since any sentence; paragraph or even the whole passage is a unity.”[7] The meaning guessing strategy has been proved more effective than stopping the reader’s reading to look up individual words. When the college students try to figure out a word's meaning from the context, they can answer the following questions. What does the close meaning of the word? What is the function of the word in the sentence? Is the word nonsensical in the sentence? By decoding the meaning of words in context, the college students are more likely to increase their reading speed, comprehension, and vocabulary. The college students can also guess the meaning of words through the cause and effect relation. “Cause and effect relation is a common and logic relation that can provide us with the information of the meaning of the new words. A certain cause must lead to a certain effect and a certain result must be caused by a certain cause.” [8] During the process of reading, the college students may find some symbol words for the relation, such as because, as, since, therefore, as a result, etc. These words will help the college students to grasp the whole idea of the essay.共2页: 1 [2] 下一页 论文出处(作者):