Cultivating High School Students’ English Reading Interest and AbilitybyA thesis presented to the School of English EducationofXi’an International Studies Universityin partial fulfillment of the requirementsfor the degree ofBachelor of ArtsMay 20, 2013Class:Advisor:外国语大学毕业论文开题报告AcknowledgementsI would like to express my sincere thanks to all who have helpedme through various ways for my writing of this thesis.Firstly, I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Ms Jing, for her continuous encouragement and expert supervision. Ms Jing gave me many invaluable instructions and helped me much in every stage of my thesis writing. Secondly, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Hai, and teachers at the Department of English, who have instructed and helped me a lot in the past two years.Moreover, my numerous thanks go to my dear friends and my lovely classmates, who spent much time with me on my thesis. Thanks should also be given to the directors and teachers for my college. What they taught me has paved a way for my writing of the thesis.Finally, I would like to offer my sincere gratitude to those who spend their precious time in reading this thesis.培养中学生英语阅读兴趣和能力摘要：阅读是获取信息、扩大知识面的重要手段，并在英语教学中占有非常重要的位置。

同时，由于近年来高考试题中的阅读量在不断增加，因此培养学生的阅读兴趣和能力越来越被广大中学师生所重视，中学英语学科课程标准更是将培养学生的阅读能力作为主要的教学目标之一。

但是目前，我国中学生英语阅读量严重不足。

由于课业负担重，考试负担重，有些学生缺乏英语阅读兴趣，甚至对阅读怀有恐惧心理，阅读失分率较高；有些学生仅能应付解题，完成一定的课外作业，满足于读课文等有限的语言资料，因而中学英语阅读兴趣和能力的培养可以说是任重道远。

本文通过阐述阅读的重要性，分析目前中学生的阅读现状和制约中学生阅读能力的因素，然后论述在英语阅读课堂中的教学技巧和策略，同时提出怎样的教学技巧和策略可以更有效地培养学生的英语阅读兴趣、提高英语阅读能力。

希望能为中学的课堂教学研究尽一份自己的绵薄之力。

关键词：英语阅读；课堂教学；培养兴趣；能力；教学技巧；策略Cultivating High School Students’ English Reading Interestand AbilityAbstract:Reading has always been regarded as an important method to acquire information and expand knowledge, and it occupies a very important position in the teaching of English. Meanwhile, due to the increasing amount of reading in the College Entrance Examination in recent years, cultivating students’ English reading interest and ability has attracted more and more attention from all the high school teachersand students, and the high school English curriculum standards even takes it as the main teaching goal. However, high school students’English reading has been a serious shortfall in our country now. Because of the heavy academic burden and too many exams, some students are lack of interest in reading, even fear to read; some students can only cope with simple reading comprehension questions and complete homework. They are satisfied with reading the limited language materials–textbooks. Therefore, cultivating high school students’ English reading interest and ability can say a long way to go. By describing the importance of reading, analyzing the status quo of current high school students’English reading and the factors restricting high school students’ English reading abilities, this thesis mainly discusses the strategies and skills in teaching English reading, and proposes which strategies and skills can cultivate high school students’English reading interest and ability effectively. Here I humbly hope that my thesis can make a contribution for the secondary English classroom teaching.Key words: English reading; classroom teaching; cultivate interest;ability; teaching skills; strategyTable of Contents1. Introduction (1)2. The importance of cultivating high school students’ English reading interest and ability (1)3. The probl ems of high school students’ English reading (4)3.1 Incorrect reading techniques (4)3.1.1 Reading word by word (4)3.1.2 Psychological translation and structure analysis (5)3.1.3 Reread the sentence from bottom to up (5)3.1.4 Referring too much to dictionary (5)3.2 Inadequate guidance from the teacher (6)4. Principles and models for teaching reading (8)4.1 Principles (8)4.2 Bottom-up model (9)4.3 Top-down model (10)4.4 Interactive model (10)5. The ways to cultivate high school students’ English reading interest and ability (11)5.1 Teachers’ instructive strategies (11)5.1.1 Strategy of cooperation (11)5.1.2 Strategy of role exchange (13)5.1.3 Strategy of picture application (13)5.2 Students’ general English reading skills (13)5.2.1 Predicting (14)5.2.2 Skimming (15)5.2.3 Scanning (15)5.2.4 Guessing skill (16)6. Conclusion (17)References (19)1. IntroductionEnglish reading has always been considered as one of the most important parts of English learning. Actually, reading is a process of mentally interpreting written symbols. It involves a series of factors that a reader brings to a text. These factors include reading ability to monitor their own comprehension, decode unknown words and fix-up strategies. Reading ability includes understanding ability and reading speed. Understanding consists of the understanding of the surface structure and the deep meaning that author expresses. Whether reading ability is good or not depends on reading speed as well as understanding level. Reading speed and reading comprehension are two elements that can not be separated. Poor reading comprehension surely results in slowdown reading speed. Neglect of reading speed must have bad effect on reading comprehension.As reading is a part of academic literacy, English teachers usually have high expectations of a student’s ability to cope with the demand of reading in English. Most students wish to read more books. Reading is a way for students to possess more knowledge and pass many kinds of examinations. However, it is also an activity that many students don’t like very much. To succeed at schools, students need to possessa range of strategies and skills to 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 students’ ability we may have to answer the follow questions: what are the English reading habits of students? Which strategies and skills we should use in English reading?2. The importance of cultivating high school students’English reading interest and abilityAs reading is very much a part of our daily life, we hardly consider the processes involved and we rarely ask the question: ‘what is reading?’ According to Day and Bamford (1998:12), ‘reading is the construction of meaning from a printed or written message.’ In other words, reading comprehension involves extracting the relevant information from the text as efficiently as possible, connecting the information from the written message with one’s own knowledge to arrive at an understanding. Reading is a silent and individual activity since the writer’s intention was for the text to be read rather than heard. There are two broad levels in the act of reading: i) a recognition task of perceiving visual signals from the printed page through the eyes;ii) a cognitive task of interpreting the visual information, relating the received information with the reader’s own general knowledge, and reconstructing the meaning that the writer had meant to convey.Reading has always been regarded as an important method to acquire information and expand knowledge, and it occupies a very important position in the teaching of English. In recent years, reading comprehension takes up more than 30% in the college entrance examination paper, and the high school English curriculum standards even takes it as the main teaching goal. This further requires that we must pay attention to cultivate students’reading comprehension ability in English teaching. However, high school students’ English reading has been a serious shortfall in our country now. Because of the heavy academic burden and too many exams, some students are lack of interest in reading, even fear to read; some students can only cope with simple reading comprehension questions and complete homework. They are satisfied with reading the limited language materials–textbooks. A lot of readings appear in an examination. But all these readings must be done in limited time. So students are asked to read them correctly and with a certain speed. To do this, they should change their bad reading habit and raise their reading efficiency. Therefore, cultivating high school students’ English reading interest and ability can say a long way to go.1.Reading in different ways for different purposesThink about the things you often read: statistics, label on medicine bottle, letter, notice, application form, street map, etc. Why did you read each one? What did you want to get from it? Was it only information? What about the letter from home? And the detective novel? You will find that you had a variety of reasons for reading, and if you ask other people this question, you would find different reasons again.Now think about the way you read each item. How did the various reasons influence this? Do you read a piece of notice the same way as a poem? How about a street map or a letter? Reading these is very unlike reading a book.The way you tackled each text was strongly influenced by your purpose in reading. Quickly scanning a page to find someone’s telephone number is very different from perusing a legal document. You probably noticed big differences in the speed you used. Did you also find that in some cases you read silently while in others you read aloud? What were the reasons that led you to articulate what you read? For most of us, reading aloud is uncommon out side the classroom.2.Reading for meaningWhatever your reasons for reading (excluding any reading for language learning), it is not very likely that you were interested in the pronunciation of what you read, and even less likely that you wereinterested in the grammatical structures used. You read because you wanted to get something from the writing. We will call this the message: it might have been facts, but could just as well have been enjoyment, ideas, and feelings (from a family letter, for instance). (Nuttall, C. 2002:3).3.Why do people read in foreign language?Perhaps the advantages of knowing a foreign language are clear to your students - better jobs, access to literature or whatever. Reading is usually recognized as a necessary part of these activities. However, if the only foreign language items you have read recently were directly concerned with your teaching, it may be that you and your students too, do not really need to read that language except for classroom purposes.If this is the case, we must not be surprised if students’motivation is low. This is a major problem for many language teachers: the motivation of needing to read is powerful. However, you can also motivate students by making their foreign language reading interesting in itself. The language is alive - its users have the same variety of purposes for reading as anybody has when reading their mother tongue - and this fact can be used by teachers to increase motivation.4.Getting a message from a textWe shall assume, therefore, that reading has one overriding purpose: to get meaning from a text. Other ways of looking at readingwill not concern us. Our business is with the ways a reader gets a message from a text. So we will begin by establishing what we mean by a message.3. The problems of high school students’ English readingNowadays, in most senior high school, although reading is regarded as an important subject, the teaching effect is not satisfying. One reason is that some students do not know about the correct reading techniques. Another reason is that some teachers neglect to guide the students how to read and what to read. Teaching does not satisfy the need of learning.3.1 Incorrect reading techniquesAs we all know, reading process is individual. Different readers have different study habits and interests, so they will meet with some problems in reading. High school students have some bad habits in reading.3.1.1 Reading word by wordReading word by word is a psychological process. According to psychologists’ study in reading, when people are reading, the eyeballs move with a leap rather than move word by word. Information comes into your brain through some key words connecting to guess sum-upand shape main idea rapidly. Students’word by word readings not only slow down the speed of reading, but also affect the overall understanding. For example: “pick up”. He picked me up on my way home. In the context of the specific circumstances, the phrase means he gave me a free ride (顺便载你一程). But I just picked English up, it means “just started to learn (刚刚开始学)”. If you take for granted for the literal meaning of “pick up”, which means “take hold of something (把…捡起来)”, it will inevitably lead to the erroneous understanding of the entire sentence. Even if some students can understand the meaning of each word or a phrase. Someone reads with his finger pointing to the words or with his head shaking. Those are all bad habits. You should read phrase by phrase. Do not shake your head, just move your eyeballs. That’s enough. If you want to get more words, information, there must be a proper distance between your eyes and the reading material.3.1.2 Psychological translation and structure analysisMany high school students cannot understand the material directly when they are reading, they are inclined to translate while reading in their heart. Through this way they understand the meaning of English sentence, the significance of the paragraph. Some high school students like to analyze the grammar structure of the sentence or pay more attention to individual word, phrase, the sentence patternor the fixed usage in the article while reading.3.1.3 Reread the sentence from bottom to upWhen students are reading, they are in habit of rereading the sentence or the part of the paragraph which they have just read. This kind of phenomenon is extremely common in high school. Some students like to read the line which was just finished from its end to the beginning. After they finished one line, they couldn’t fix their eyes on the start of the second line, but to reread the first sentence from its end to beginning. These three bad reading habits I have mentioned above will lead to the lower reading speed.3.1.4 Referring too much to dictionaryCharles Chaplin said: “you have to believe in yourself.” That’s the secret of success when students meet new words and phrases in sentence; they look them up in the dictionary at once rather than guessing the meaning by themselves. Look at the following examples: a. half a year after her marriage, Mrs. White was with child. Here “with child” is a new phrase in the sentence. One of the reasons is that there is no article before the phrase, but as long as you consider carefully with the context, you can understand the meaning of the phrase is pregnancy; b. John is a thief, he ever wants to steal the gold teeth in his grandma’s mouth. There are two block words, but as long as you know one word, you can nearly guess the meaning of the other word.3.2 Inadequate guidance from the teacherSince the students have so many bad reading habits, the teacher needs to guide them how to read and what to read. We have talked about the guidance of how to read (reading techniques) above, and here we mainly talk about the guidance of what to read.1. Why teachers need to assess textsAs I have mentioned in the introduction part, ‘because of the heavy academic burden and too many exams, some students are lack of interest in reading, even fear to read; some students can only cope with simple reading comprehension questions and complete homework. They are satisfied with reading the limited language materials–textbooks.’Therefore, as an English teacher, even if you have little control over the choice of textbooks, it helps to be aware of their strong points and limitations so that you can exploit them effectively, supplement them if necessary, and perhaps argue the case for their replacement.Probably, too, you often have to look for material to fill a gap or to deal with a particular problem that you have not experienced before. Indeed, some classes have such specific needs that most of the material must be collected by the teacher. So you are likely to find yourself having to evaluate texts for reading development.2. Assessing the students’ levelIf you know the class, you already have a good idea of what vocabulary and structures they are familiar with. If you do not know the class well, you have to find this out. You may be able to make use of vocabulary and structure lists supplied in the syllabus or textbooks used in earlier years. However, we all know that the presence of a word on a list does not guarantee that the students have learnt it, any more than its absence proves that they do not know it.If the students have varied backgrounds, a period of trial and error is unavoidable. However, a series of grade cloze tests can give you an idea of their levels. The result can only be approximate, because the tests sample only a tiny percentage of what they know, but even limited information is better than none during the first few weeks with a new set of students.A range of levels is likely in any one class; many teachers have to cope with classes where the gap between the strongest and weakest students is very wide. In an ideal word, every student would have material appropriate to his own needs. A library for extensive reading should certainly cater for the full range of levels. And classroom lessons can be valuably supplemented by self-access work at a variety of levels.However, most teachers work in circumstances where it is not possible to provide differentiated learning materials for regular classroom use. We shall assume that you have to compromise bychoosing material that suits most of the class, and that you compensate for this by giving individual attention to students who are behind the others, or are capable of handling more difficult material.3. Finding out what students likeSuggesting that you look for motivating material implies that you know what interests the students. Are you sure you do? It is worth carrying out an investigation, especially if you are planning to invest money (whether in class texts or extensive reading materials). There are several factors to bear in mind if you do decide to survey students’reading tastes.First, be cautious about questionnaire responses. For instance, in some countries the classics (Shakespeare, Dickens and so on, in the case of English) retain a strong position. People may name such writers because they consider it the proper thing to do, even if they don’t really enjoy them. Don’t rely only on their stated preferences, even expressed anonymously.One way to double - check is to find out what students actually read, bearing in mind that books read in the L1 may tell you more about reading tastes than those in the foreign language. For instance, find out which books are borrowed most often from the library: this is usually a reliable indicator of preferences. Keep an eye open for the sort of reading matter the students usually carry with them. If it does notinclude works of literary merit, there is no need to be surprised. But you might consider providing similar material in the target language: if the students want to read it, half the battle has been won.Finally, monitor the popularity of the materials you choose, and be prepared to change.4. Selecting texts for classroom studyAn enquiry of this kind particularly affects the choice of books for extensive reading, but has implications for classroom texts as well. You may not want to study in class the sort of material that has the most immediate appeal for your students; comics, romances and thrillers have been used successfully by some teachers, but others prefer less controversial material for actual lessons. Nevertheless, you need texts that will interest most of the students and will not actually bore the others; and it is much easier to teach well if the texts interest you, too.In addition to being interesting, some classroom texts at least should represent the kind of material students will need to handle after they leave the foreign language class. Sometimes these criteria conflict, but not only you can decide how to balance them. It is often better to begin on material chosen chiefly for enjoyment, until reading skills improve. And even if you are training students specifically to read, for instance, university medical texts, you may get better results if you use simpler and more motivating material to begin with. School textbooksoften provide simple models of academic discourse; it is useful to have a collection of them (in the foreign language) on subjects suited to the class.4. Principles and models for teaching reading4.1 PrinciplesWhen teaching reading, great care should be taken regarding how we should teach, which involves materials selection, task design, students motivation and skills development.●The selected texts and attached tasks should be accessible to thestudents. Inaccessible texts and tasks do not help improve students’ reading skills but cause frustration.●Tasks should be clearly given in advance. Preferably, tasks shouldmotivate students.●Tasks should be designed to encourage selective and intelligentreading for the main meaning rather than test the students’understanding of trivial details.●Tasks should help develop students’ reading skills rather than testtheir reading comprehension. If you always ask students to read passages then answer multiple choice questions, you are actually testing them not developing their reading skills.●The teacher should help students not merely to cope with oneparticular text in class but to develop their reading strategies and reading ability in general so that they are able to apply the strategies or skills learned in class to tackle other texts they encounter outside class or in the future.●The teacher should provide enough guidance and assistance at thebeginning to help students read and develop reading strategies but gradually withdraw his/her guidance as students progress so that they eventually become independent readers.4.2 Bottom-up modelThe way one teaches reading always reflects the way one understands reading and the reading process. Some teachers teach reading by introducing new vocabulary and structures first and then going over the text sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph with the students. This is then followed by questions and answers to check comprehension. Also a lot of time is spent on having students read aloud the text. This way of teaching reflects the belief that reading comprehension is based on the mastery of the new words and new structures as well as a lot of reading aloud practice. It basically follows a linear process from the recognition of letters to words, to phrases, to sentences, to paragraphs, and then to the meaning of the whole text. This way of teaching is known to follow a bottom-up model.4.3 Top-down modelHowever, a different view believes that one’s background knowledge plays a more important role than new words and new structures in reading comprehension. For example, we all have experiences of reading something that does not contain any new words or new structures, but we still fail to understand its overall meaning. In other cases, we may read an article which contains quite a number of new words as well as difficult structures with reasonable understanding. This is because we have made use of our knowledge about the topic to assist our comprehension. Therefore, it is believed that in teaching reading, the teacher should teach the background knowledge first so that students equipped with such knowledge will be able to guess meaning from the printed page. This process of reading is said to follow the top-down model. Just as Goodman (1967) once said reading is ‘psycholinguistic guessing game’.4.4 Interactive modelThe current theory views reading as an interactive process. That is to say, the brain receives visual information and at the same time, interprets or reconstructs the meaning the writer had when he wrote the text. This process does not only involve the printed page but also the reader’s knowledge of the language in general, of the world, and of the text types. During the process of reading, all these factors interact witheach other and compensate for each other. Therefore, a proficient reader should have good language skills: automatic recognition of words and phrases, understanding sentence structures, building a discourse structure, etc. Then he integrates this decoding process with what he/she already knows about the topic. One’s general knowledge about the world and about the text types are known as schemas or schemata, which has been described as the ‘cognitive constructs which allow for the organization of information in our long-term memory’ (Widdowson, 1983). During the reading process, our mind by interacting with the printed page – its words, phrases, sentences, as well as the context it provides can be stimulated and a proper schema will be activated to allow us to relate the incoming information to already known information. If we do not have the type of necessary schema for a particular reading text, let’s say cultural specific knowledge, we may have to resort heavily to other knowledge which is available, such as our linguistic knowledge and text type knowledge to aid our comprehension. Similarly, when we do not have the necessary linguistic knowledge, we will have to resort to our world knowledge to help ease the difficulties in comprehension. Obviously, a good knowledge base of all the above is essential for good reading comprehension and we believe a good linguistic basis is the fundamental as far as foreign language reading in concerned.Based on the understanding of reading as an interactive process, teaching reading in the classroom divides the teaching procedures into basically three stages in which bottom-up and top-down techniques are integrated to help students develop their reading strategies and increase their language efficiency in general. The three stages are pre-reading, while-reading, post-reading.5. The ways to cultivate high school students’ Englishreading interest and ability5.1 Teachers’ instructive strategiesMany reading techniques and advices have been talked in this thesis. And in order to avoid the problems mentioned above in the real classroom teaching, teachers should know some teaching strategies to carry on their teaching effectively.5.1.1 Strategy of cooperationTo improve students’ reading ability and enlarge their vocabulary through cooperation is a comparatively effective way, especially for classes with variety of learning levels. There are altogether four parts: 1. Preparation before readingThe goal of this stage is: Make the students to know the information of the article which will be read as many as possible in the short time. Forecast the information which is going to be involved in the article may stimulate their interest in what they are reading, and servethe reading in the next step. It includes two parts:a. Students can acquire some information in reading by inciting their brains. For instance, students are given ninety seconds to write all the information related to the topics, and then gather their information in one minute.b. Students are encouraged to forecast what the material is going to say or they are asked to write down.2. Detail readingThe aim of this stage is to train the students to monitor their own understanding of a material. Let them know which part they could understand, which part cannot. When the students have determined the paragraph which they don’t understand, they may through the following way to read effectively.(1) Picking out the key words.(2) Searching the former sentence and the following one.(3) Seeking the prefix and the suffix of the new word.3. The understanding of the general ideaIn this stage, students have to do the following parts:a. Seeking for the main time, place, and event in the paragraph and so on.b. Using their own words to introduce the most important viewpoint about these characters, places, as well as events.。