李晓雪
（阿勒泰地区第二高级中学 新疆 阿勒泰 8356500）
Abstract: With the socialization of information and economic globalization in the 21st century, the importance of English has become increasingly prominent. In China, cultivating English reading comprehension is one of the important purposes of high English reading teaching. Therefore, it is necessary to know the teachers’ teaching status and students’ learning situation. According to the new requirements of the new curriculum standards for high school English, this thesis simply analyzes the problems existing in English reading teaching and the reasons for them through some interviews, and puts forward corresponding strategies on how to improve the efficiency of English reading teaching.
Key words: New Curriculum Standard; High English; Reading teaching; Reading strategy
1.Requirements of New Curriculum Standard
Based on the general objectives of the curriculum, the specific objectives of the general high school English curriculum are to develop and cultivate subject core competencies such as the core literacy of language skills, cultural awareness, thinking quality, learning ability and so on, after students receive high school English education for student, including following aspects：(1)to understand the meaning that oral and written texts expressed, to recognize the appropriate ways to present themselves and efficiently to use spoken and written language to express their thinking and proceed interpersonal communication;(2) to get cultural knowledge, to understand the cultural connotation, to have a certain ability to communicate cross-culturally and propagate the Chinese cultural;(3) to have the preliminary ability to use English to carry on own independent thinking and creative thinking;(4) to build up the correct view of English learning, to keep the constant interests about learning English, and enable student to acquire English learning resources from various channels, like Internet, social media.
Chinese English Curriculum Standard shows that the value of reading should be to motivate students’ interests and reading ability, which will help students to study. Students who have completed high school learning should have the ability to use English to acquire, analyze and solve problems. Compared with the past Curriculum Standard, the New Curriculum Standard put forward higher requirements for high school students, embodied in the following seven aspects: (1) to understand the general English newspapers or magazines so as to acquire information intention of the word through the whole context; (2) to read the English original works to grasp the main plot and understand the main characters (3) to read various non-professional technical materials such as product manuals (4) to guess unfamiliar language phenomena based on situation and context (5) to handle complex language problem by using the various reference materials and tools books in use primitive reading strategies to gain information on the basis of different reading aims; (6) to have wide interest or reading and good reading habits; (7) to collect and handle the information through the internet and social media.
According to the requirements of the New Curriculum Standard of high school English, that is, “focus on cultivating students reading ability”, the requirements for the current students’ reading ability in high school English teaching have also been improved. The majority of English teachers are aware of the importance of nurturing and improving students’ English reading ability. However, high school English reading teaching still has varieties of problems, which block the efficacy of reading teaching primarily.
2. Problems and Reasons
2.1 Problems and Reasons for Students
2.1.1 Weak Interest in Learning English Reading
For English language learners, interest is the best teacher, because the mind of students in high school is not yet well mature, in the process of learning they are often more likely to pay more attention to the subjects they like from their heart, not interested in the subject which they feel not good, so as to lack their motivation even giving up these lessons in the process of learning. If this situation becomes a vicious circle, it will make students less interested in the course they don’t like best, the results will become worse. One of the biggest problems of high school English reading teaching ignores to cultivate students’ interest in reading, this condition is reflected in two aspects, the first is a relatively single content, and the second is a single way of class.
High school students’ reading disorder is caused by their own learning characteristics. High school students are in the vital stage both in the physical and psychological, this stage of the students is characterized by curiosity, finding a sense of satisfaction, achieving self-value, like hunting novelty, lack of attention and perseverance easily disturbed by external things, especially boys. These features have caused some difficulties for many English reading of high school students. If they can’t focus on reading, it is difficult to understand the depth of this passage and lack meditation to understand the practice and practical spirit.
2.1.2 Lacking Related Knowledge and Culture
(1) Lacking Cultural Background Knowledge
Cultural habits in the eastern and western are different. They are different in the way of life and way of thinking, etc. If the western people receive the gift, they will open it immediately, and they will say: “It’s very nice. Thank you.” And they Chinese people have to wait for guests to leave, and then the gift will be opened. Different cultural habits, not only show up in the ideological and behavior, but also show up in the language expression. When the British people meet each other, they will say: “It is fine, isn’t it!” This is different from our country. Chinese people often asked their neighbors: “Do you have a meal?” If the other is a western, people will misunderstand whether you want to ask him to eat. Only understanding these cultural habits, they can understand the implication of reading materials.
High school students almost have no time and energy to enjoy the English film and television, network and other things. In the case of rare reading, little accumulation of knowledge, sight is not open enough. For the people who are coming from European and American countries, students don’t understand their cultural background, lifestyle, thinking habits, and thus can’t improve the English reading ability fundamentally.
(2) Lacking Grammar Knowledge
Language consists of words and grammatical structures. The accuracy of the understanding depends on the degree of vocabulary and grammar. In the case of learning the language, for example, when the children begin to learn foreign languages, they must learn some words first, and then start to contact the rules of the sentence grammar, and then they can use words to make sentence. Only understanding the principles of the game, one can win the game completely. Sometimes it is easy to find that some students have remembered lots of words, they may say that they know its meanings, because they know these words, but when these words are arranged to a sentence, these learners can’t understand them. Why? That’s because they are not familiar with grammar. Grammar is a skeleton that produces a variety of different lexical combinations. In English reading, there are countless complex sentences, even if they understand each word in the sentence, they may not understand the meaning of the sentence correctly.
(3) Lacking Vocabulary Knowledge
The importance of reading is first reflected in the deepening of students’ understanding of vocabulary. Learning the language, the most basic thing is to master the vocabulary of the language; vocabulary is the cornerstone of language. Vocabulary learning can’t only recite the memory, but also can understand the meaning through the memory, reading can help students understand the meaning of words and the application of vocabulary; Second, the reading ability could improve their writing ability; third, through the improvement of reading ability, so as to improve the students’ listening and speaking ability. Through reading, students can learn more vocabulary and statements, and after a long time, they will use these words and statements better.
For high school students, the most important task of learning English is vocabulary. It can be said that the more vocabulary, the easier it is to learn English. In reality, due to improper learning methods, lack of systematic methods to learn vocabulary, students’ vocabulary is quite limited although they often carry word books. The ability to use grammar knowledge is not proficient enough. When they encounter difficult sentences, they can’t split sentences in a short time and therefore can’t understand sentences precisely.
2.2 Problems and Reasons for Teachers
Dull and boring class contents show up in following cases: the classroom content is boring, and the teacher always chooses reading materials with more knowledge points; they want to instill a large number of points of knowledge through explaining. The whole class carries through with duck-stuffing teaching methods; students accept all kinds of knowledge points passively. For a long time, the single boring nature of the textbook reduces the reader’s interests in reading, even students regard reading as a learning task, which is useless for language learning. This kind of teaching content is a burden undoubtedly, so teaching becomes rigid and unfavorable to English teaching and learning.
At present, most high school teachers’ teaching philosophy is more backward, They still think that the English reading teaching is just for tests, in the teaching process, they are more concerned about the word, grammar, knowledge points of the article, and they have not get out of the traditional teaching method, often overlook to explain the cultural significance of the article. In fact, the majority of teachers still stay in the original reading teaching methods. In this way, they have ignored interactive links with students, students just act as the recipient of the knowledge, do not have their own thinking to understand. Over time, this will affect students’ reading interests seriously.
In English reading teaching, the lack of emotional teaching is also reflected in the lack of teachers and students’ communication, teachers don’t understand the students’ learning needs, fail to provide differentiated teaching, lack of relevance. When their achievement is not ideal, in depressed circumstances, teachers fail to encourage them in time.
3. Countermeasures of English reading teaching
As is shown in the investigation, only 13% of teachers believe that they have explained more reading strategies to students. Many teachers agree that the focus of reading teaching is reading skills, but they rarely introduce these skills to students in teaching actually. Obviously, after we learning the problems of student reading, we should use good reading strategies to solve the reading comprehension.
Stimulating interests is the first thing to do for students. English teaching materials have been put into some life topics which are closer to life; the purpose of materials is to improve students’ interests in learning. In the actual teaching, the teacher can use flexible teaching methods, such as the use of multimedia teaching to increase the atmosphere of the classroom, playing some small video or music related to articles.
According to the English level of students and the type of articles, teachers should use different strategies to solve them, mobilizing students to participate in learning with enthusiasm. In order to cultivate students’ enthusiasm for reading English, students should read three to five small articles every day, the difficulty of reading should not be too high at the beginning. For the choice of reading materials, teachers should not only stay in the textbooks and examinations, they should select some interesting reading materials to stimulate students, but also teachers should allow students to choose their own articles which they are interested in.
Through a lot of reading, students can not only expand their knowledge, but also open up their sights, broaden their thinking method, access the information which textbooks are not necessarily involved in. More reading, will help students to form good reading habits, the students will be able to translate English into Chinese meaning automatically in the process of reading, which will increase the students’ self-confidence to some extent.
4. Conclusion
At the first place, in the aspect of students, a majority of students are not fond of high English reading; Some of them are short of confidence to learn, so while they do some reading practices, they are easily getting into a bad feeling; Own to the students don’t have enough relevant knowledge and culture, they would not understand evidently what they have read from the passage; Besides, they still are short of good reading habits. The causes of these issues are as follows: short of basic knowledge; short of crucial psychological quality; short of relevant knowledge.
In the second place, in aspect of teachers, the teachers would like to choose dull and boring reading materials. And teachers just introduce students a large input of knowledge. Beyond that, they also are short of teaching techniques and strategies.
Last but not the least; they still would like to use traditional teaching methods.
Despite the limitation of time and personal ability, this thesis has a significant influence on the current situation of junior English reading teaching. Reading comprehension has been involved in every English test in the school. Hence, it appears that English teachers should put more stress on the training and boosting of students’ reading ability. However, the main problem is that, teachers and students could not have a full view of the present status of English reading teaching and learning. Thus it is necessary and imperative to take this research of the present situation of English reading teaching and learning in high schools.
This is a tardy and difficult course for enhancing English reading ability of high school students. For the sake of boosting the ratio of English reading teaching and learning, teachers and students must conquer the passive factors which confining the reading. The goal of this study is to give rise to the mind of teachers in English reading teaching, at the same time to put forward some useful strategies for English teachers, and elevate the improvement of English reading teaching.
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