The Analysis of Reading Barriers in English Major and the Countermeasures
Chapter One Introduction
With the development and improvement of international exchange，English has become an essential tool for communication among people from different nations and regions. The present study is a survey study which attempts to emphasize the importance of English reading in university students’ study and to know some difficulties they meet when they are reading .It aims to summarize proper methods and countermeasures to help students improve their English reading ability.80 English major students were participated in this survey in the form of responding to a questionnaire.
Reading is quite essential for language acquisition，especially in the environment of studying English as a foreign language. In present-day society，with the economic globalization，two-thirds of newspapers ,magazines and periodical spread in English all over the world. Therefore, English reading plays a very important role in college students’ acquisition of knowledge and analysis of English material increasingly. At present, reading is the major input of language, during the learning process of college students, among the four language skills—listening, speaking ,reading ,and writing, reading has accounted a lot. As Kristen(1985) said ,“reading is good for language acquisition; it promotes better spelling, better writing skills, higher reading comprehension and more advanced vocabulary.”One’s reading ability is a major
indication of his integrative language proficiency. But compared with a lot of theoretical research in English reading, survey studies are superior to theoretical ones. Studies abroad，they are based on the design of good experiment to demonstrate the limitations of existing theories. It aims to revise and improve the existing theories (Inagaki S,2002). In contrary, studies at home, English reading research focused on schema theory to guide English reading and English teaching, application of reading strategies and theory basis, the mental process of reading and so on(Yi,2003). In general, studies at home were more inclined to the worship of existing models and theories, to apply them directly.
The present study is a survey study on the influential factors in college students’ English reading .With the help of a questionnaire, the present study attempts to find out the difficulties that college students always confront with in English reading and try to offer countermeasures to solve them.
The thesis consists of five chapters. This chapter is an introduction. Chapter Two is a literature review，which gives the definition of reading and
countermeasures，methods of reading and some related studies. Chapter three presents the research method，research question and data collection. Chapter Four describes the results and analysis from the questionnaire as well as effective countermeasures. And Chapter Five is the last part of this study. It summarize the major findings，implications and also gives the recommendations for future studies.
Chapter Two Literature Review
This chapter contains three sections. The first section is about the definition of reading and second section is about factors involved in English reading and the last one is three models of reading. 2.1 The Definition of Reading
Authorities and experts on the teaching of reading have different views on what reading is. In general terms, reading involves the reader, the text, and the interaction between reader and text .According to Douglas(1981:82),the nature of silent reading is about the behavior of a reader. The text and the reader do not constitute actual reading. What constitutes actual reading is the interaction between the text and reader.
Francoise(1981:5) defined from the aspect of information ,“Understanding a written text means extracting the required information from it as efficiently as possible. ”This means reading is a comprehensive process. Wilga(1987:187) describes a similar idea that reading is a complex, actively thinking psychological activity, which is not a passive, but rather an active process. Reading is also a completely individual activity. It is the mental activities that readers focus on in order to construct his meaning and understanding from a text.
However, Nuttal(1982:222) disagreed that reading necessarily involved understanding:“reading is the identification of linguistic forms from strings of written configuration that present them, as evidenced by producing the conventional signs for the same linguistic form in some other system of representation.”
Although there are different views about a precise definition of reading, the most
useful and practical one to today’s English reading is not only an active process, but also a comprehensive process. In English reading, find weakness and try to close the gap.
2.2 Factors Involved in English reading
Students often have difficulties in improving their reading ability. These difficulties not only result from their method of learning, but mostly from their lack of basic knowledge about sentence structures, parts of speech, tense, voice, and non-predicting verbs and so on. Also they are lacking of vocabulary and some background knowledge of the English- speaking countries. In view of
Krash(1985:103), three sub-factors need to be taken account into their part to promote reading competence. They are adequate vocabulary, ability to speculate on lexical meanings and awareness of lexical deviations. Vocabulary serves as the most preliminary foundation for English reading comprehension. But only few students admit that they have adequate vocabulary to fulfill their understanding.
Grammar roles and sentence patterns are also fundamental elements in English reading. Because of the grammar confusion, students often do not understand the reading material although they know all the words. If the students are unable to distinguish the main clause from a subordinate clause and are unable to know their relationships, despite understanding the meaning of every word in the sentence, understanding is unlikely to occur with accuracy.
Language is rather like a mirror that reflects the national culture of its speaker. The American linguist Sapir thinks the language cannot exist without culture. Culture
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