; How to cultivate Students' Reading
ability
Abstract
How to cultivate students’ reading ability is an urgent affair. It’s also one of the most important factors in middle school English teaching and learning. This passage analyses the difficulties in the teaching reading and proposes some proper solutions to them. She has also pointed out that grasping the scientific skills and methods of reading comprehension is the most important strategy in improving English.
Key words:English language teaching comprehension impediment, comprehension methods reading ability cultivating
Main Headings
Introduction :
Content
1. Skimming and Scanning
2. The author’s viewpoint
3. The structure of the passage
4. The structure of paragraphs
5. Students' Anticipation
6. Punctuation
7. Summarizing
Conclusion:
Bibliography
Introduction :
How to cultivate students’ interests in reading is the key to improving students’ reading ability. The traditional
method of having students read silently, answer
comprehension questions, and then discuss an article can become boring to both students and teachers. An
alternative to this traditional approach is turning articles into jigsaw activities, in which any one student only has a portion of the information needed to complete a task.
Junior English Reading Teaching is an extremely important part of teaching. The aim of our teaching is to train our students’lability to do reading on their own and the ability to use the language properly. Moreover, in recent years College Entrance Examinations, reading
comprehension covers more than 60%, which further requires that we should pay attention to cultivating students in English reading comprehension.
Content
Reading is one of the important skills in English learning. Its purpose is to enlarge their vocabulary and familiarize themselves with background information about English and to cultivate(培养) students' careful observation and their logic thinking. What is more, it is to improve students' comprehension. I have tried to train my students in the following ways: skimming and scanning, author's viewpoint, structure of the passage, structure of paragraphs, students' anticipation, punctuation and summarizing.
1. Skimming and Scanning
Before starting to read a passage in detail, first I ask the students to take a moment to preview the passage. Read quickly, without pausing to study the details. This is called skim reading. The students ask them to have these in mind:
for which the passage was written, what type of passage it is, what the purpose and attitude of the authoris and what the style of the article is. After having skimmed the passage, the students can study the passage in more detail, reading more slowly and carefully and looking for specific information that the questions are concerned with. This is called scanning. When students do the scanning, I ask them to read without any sound, to notice only the key words and not to pay too much attention to the new words but to pay the sense group and the main meaning of the sentence. Especially pay attention to the first sentence and the last sentence of the paragraph.
2. The author’s viewpoint
In reading a passage I ask the students to makes guesses about the position of the author. Is the author nautral or does the author show his own opinion. The author often shows his opinion either by adding certain phrases or by adding a value to a word. I let the students to pay more attention to these words that the author can add, like luckily, unfortunately to show that he is pleased or not pleased with something. He can also add words, which show his surprise, regret or other emotions, for example surprisingly,
to shock, unexpectedly, regrettably, pity, desirable, to be disappointed, etc. The author may also use words to indicate the level of certainty, for example: certain, obviously, undoubtedly, naturally, always, often, likely, probably, maybe, unlikely, hardly, rarely, never, etc. Another possibility is that the author adds words to comment on more or less objective facts.
3. The structure of the passage
I let the students know that the structure of a passages mostly with a title and sometimes a subtitle. After that, the introduction and the body followed by a conclusion or summary. An important aspect of reading is prediction. The better the student can predict what he or she is going to read, the faster and more effective he or she will read. The prediction process begins with the title. The introduction mostly informs the student about what he can expect. The body consists of paragraphs. Each paragraph deals with one aspect of the subject matter. Paragraphs are linked in a logical way; and the conclusion puts the subject matter in the right perspective. I asked the students' to form. the main idea of the passage by putting the topic sentence of every paragraph.
4. The structure of paragraphs
I tell the students that a paragraph is a group of sentences.
A typical paragraph consists of three parts.
The first sentence usually contains the topic sentence, which is the heart of the paragraph. The topic sentence contains the new aspect of the subject of the passage.
The second part of the paragraph contains sentences, which develop the aspect. These sentences may contain arguments, explanations, details, examples, and other supporting evidence.
The last sentence of a paragraph is often a summary of the paragraph or a linking sentence to the next paragraph. So we can get a good impression of the contents of the paragraph by the structure.
5. Students' Anticipation(推测)
I let students know that even if you have a wide and flexible vocabulary you will encounter words of which they do not know the meaning. Very often there is not enough time to look up all those words in a dictionary. This means
that students should be able to guess the meaning of the word. This is often possible if the student understands the relationships between words in meaning and form. I ask the student to notice the word formation if they meet new words. From the roots and affixes and conversion and compounding, they learn to try to guess the meaning of the word according to the content.
To make a good guess at the meaning of the word, I ask students to pay attention to the clues; indications that help him find that meaning. If you meet new words and try to find if there are synonyms and repeated ideas of the new words.
I teach students to follow these steps:
1) Determine the word class, i.e. a verb, a noun, an adjective, an adverb, etc.
2) Determine its function in the sentence, i.e. is it an attributive or an adverbial?
3) Contextual clues, is the context in which we find this word positive or negative; what does the context tell us about the word?
4) Word formations, is there any relation between this word and a word that is familiar to you?
5) Guess the eventual meaning of the word logically and reasonably.
6. Punctuation
I teach the students to know punctuation is partly based on grammar. For example, commas are often used to separate clauses. If the student understands the meaning and usage of punctuation marks, it will be easier to understand the grammatical structures. Punctuation marks also indicate how the author wants the student to interpret a piece of passage. For example, if the author puts something in brackets, the part of the sentence should be interpreted as an addition to the sentence. Sometimes the parentheses indicate the author's point of view.
7. Summarizing
We know that it is very difficult to remember the complete contents of long passages. For that reason it is often advisable to make notes of information in the passage that is essential for the student. The result is a short outline
of the passage containing all aspects of the passage. In this way students can grasp the main ideas of the passage.
I ask the students to follow these steps:
1) Familiarize(熟习) with the material. After students
have read the passage or a section of it, they can start summarizing. The length of the section read through depends on the structure and the complexity(复杂) of the
passage.
2) Select important information. I ask the students to go through each paragraph, sentence by sentence, asking themselves which information is absolutely essential to the argument. They should point out complete sentences as much as possible. An alternative is to underline or highlight important sentences or phrases. Pay attention to these important points: author, title, reason why the passage was written, purpose, theme, key words, link words, all major aspects, explanations, author’s opinion. Less important points: introduction, summary, repetition, examples, important figures and dates.
3) Paraphrase the information. I ask the students to point out the information of the previous step in their own words.