杨柳 重庆市梁平红旗中学校
中图分类号：G652.2 文献标识码：A 文章编号：ISSN1001-2982 （2020）12-027-01
The main aims of reading are to bring us foreign language knowledge, cultural knowledge and all kinds of thoughts and to offer us a source of enjoyment, which can widen our knowledge, language experience and horizons. Chinese students improve their reading and writing skills mostly by following their teachers’ suggestions. That’s why English teachers should emphasize the teaching methods and skills in reading and writing teaching activities.
1. Checking students’ reading speed
Give students a passage to read and a few multiple-choice questions to test their reading. Suppose that student A reads 140 words per minute and gives all the right answers while student B reads 200 words per minute but gives only 70% of the right answers, which is a better reader? Personally, I prefer the latter.
2. Guiding students to read in questions
Reading in questions is the key to improving reading skills. To understand what they read, students should have inquisitive minds, and ask themselves questions before, during and after their reading.
3. Paying attention to the relationship between sentences
There are cases where students know all the words but don’t understand the sentence. At this time, teachers should analyze the sentence and remind students to pay attention to the punctuation, the conjunction words, such as but, though, while and that, and the sentence patterns. It’s also necessary for students to know about some figures of speech, such as metaphor and exaggeration.
4. Marking a book
In order to get a full understanding of a passage, students should not read ten lines at one glance but read between the lines and even write between the lines. Reading is an active thinking activity. If the passages are filled with notes, active reading is guaranteed. Writing while reading urges students to think more, strengthens their memory and is beneficial to their revision. Marking a book is like having a silent conversation with the writer, which will help students understand the passage better.
5. Guided reading
Guided reading is also called three readings, that is, pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading. Before reading, the teacher puts forward some questions about the passage to be read for students to think about, which will contribute to their reading. The teacher can use the chance to teach students some related background knowledge, new words, grammar and learning strategies. While reading, the teacher gives students their reading tasks and some reading methods, such as silent reading, extensive reading, fast reading and intensive reading. As for post-reading, there are a great many activities, such as learning words and grammar, discussion and writing.
To sum up, it’s universally acknowledged that reading is of vital importance to Chinese students in English learning. The methods above can help develop reading ability.