Fast reading ability.docx

1、Fast reading ability1. Introduction1.1 Research BackgroundFor effective language learning and teaching due attention should be paid to the reading ability of the students. In some country, the studentsreading ability is far behind and that has become one of the main factors that prevent them from le

2、arning English well. This is beacouse the students have not enough vocabulary, not enough basic grammar knowledge, especially sentence structure knowledge. They know little about the background knowledge for effective reading and they know little about the reading strategies. This thesis is an inves

3、tigation into reading ability with testing, questionnaires,surveying and analyzing. The related causes have been analyzed.1.2 The Purpose of this Study This thesis is trying to investigate and study the reading ability of the senior high school students with the theory of schema, reading psychology,

4、 learning psychology etc, to learn the real level of the reading ability, analyze the cause which leads to the present situation. Therefore we hold that it is high time that due attention were paid to studentsreading ability. The present study focuses upon the investigation of the reading ability fo

5、r the following aims：1. To help the teachers and students to understand the importance of English reading. It is hoped that this study will,to some extent, contribute to the further studies of English reading and bring the academic attention to the research of reading ability.2. To help the educator

6、s as well as administrators to have some knowledge of English reading ability. Only when the instructors and educational administrators work together to highlight the importance of reading ability, can we say that successful English learning will be more down-to-earth.1.3 Significance of this Study

7、As present Hu Chundong, Wang Cairen claim in their book- 0n reading, that in our country most of the senior high school students study english in the hope of getting good marks in the NMET and laying a solid foundation for their further study in college. While the most difficult part in various kind

8、s of tests is reading comprehension. It covers the most part of the papers in China, so it is in the tests abroad. To our senior high school students English reading is not only one of the purpose of English study but also the means and channals. English reading skills are not only the most importan

9、t language skills but also one of the learning skills that leaners should master. This is because English reading ability is the foundation of the other liguistic ability development of the learners. Through reading the learners develop their English reading ability upon the conviction that English

10、reading ability research is significant in the English learning and teaching in following ways:1. It can help an individual to understand his or her own likely approach to read and how to use the basic skills and strategies better.2. It certainly should help teachers, trainers, or education administ

11、rators to pay more attention to the development of the reading ability of the students.3. This study is especially significant in that it is one of the multi-dimensional probes into reading ability in our country. For a long time the issue of reading ability has been neglected. It is hoped that the

12、study will contribute to the future investigation in this regard. This thesis may offer some usefull suggestions to our English teachers in their teaching jobs. Much attentions should be paid to their english teaching.2. Review of Related LiteratureFor literature review, we start first with an intro

13、duction to the investigation into reading ability, followed by previous researches on the issue abroad as well as at home.2.1 A General Introduction to Research into Reading AbilityTraditionally reading is regarded as a bottom-up model. Frank Smith called it as an out-side-in modelthat is the proces

14、s from text to brain. In this model, the readers are seen as decoders. The process of decoding is to decode from one line to line, from letters to letters, from words to phrases, from phrases to sentences and then from sentences to paragraph, to text and finally from the text to the intention of the

15、 author. In modern times, the process of reading is thought of as a top-down model, Mr. Smith called it an inside-out model. In this model the readers decides the ways in which a text is understood and dealt with. Sometimes people call it a top-down revolution.People with the top-down model regard t

16、he reading process as a psycholinguistic guessing game. They say the way in which the readers decode is not accurate. The readers understand the whole text with decode, while taking in whole trunks of text, readers would confirm his expectation. During this process of predicting, sampling and confir

17、ming, readers will build the frame of the entire meaning of the whole text.Therefore the psycholinguistic guessing game is at no means the readers random guess but the guess with frame and proof. This proof is the readers pre-structure knowledge and words information of the text.As the knowledge and

18、 experience the reders already have had play an important role in reading. The experts of reading therefore pay special attention to the study of the schema theory. Schemata refer to the experience gained in the past. This kinds of experience forms a set or fixed schema, affecting the future ways in

19、 which knowledge and experience are obtained and dealt with.In the late 1980s the top-down model was challenged by an interactive model. People with the interactive model point out that strictly the top-down model can not explain many results of reading research and experient thoroughly. They say th

20、at the successful reading is the combination of the top-down model and the bottom-up model. That is the interactive model. 2.2 Relationship between Reading Strategies and Reading Ability ImprovementMany people may throw doubt on whether reading strategy can be learned through practice. But the true

21、fact is that it can. “Teachers who understand that reading is a strategic process establish environments that provide opportunities for children to learn language and learn about language while they are using language for real purposes.”(Halliday, 1976) 2.2.1 Declarative and Procedural KnowledgeIn c

22、ognitive perspective, most information is stored in long-term memory as either declarative or procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge consists of facts and concepts, or what we know, whereas procedural knowledge consists of skills performing various mental processes such as receptive skills, pro

23、ductive skills, conversational procedures, communicative strategies, and learning strategies, or the things we know how to do. For example, declarative knowledge is what you have when you read and understand the instructions for programming the DVD player. Procedural knowledge is what you demonstrat

24、e when you program the DVD player.Declarative knowledge or factual information maybe acquired quickly and can usually be expressed verbally, or declared. So, we are able to describe the contents of declarative knowledge. Procedural knowledge is acquired gradually and only with extensive practice. Mo

25、st students can have declarative knowledge about reading strategies but may not be able to apply these strategies effectively without conscious effect and deliberation. In other words, their declarative knowledge has not been turned into procedural knowledge. If teachers help students in strategies

26、application and provide them with a variety of opportunities for practice, students will learn to use the strategies automatically and effectively in specific tasks.2.2.2 Stages of Skill AcquisitionProcedural skills are acquired in a progression through three stages of learning: the cognitive, assoc

27、iative, and autonomous stages.1) Cognitive Stage:At the beginning of the process of skill acquisition, new information enters in declarative form. In this stage, learners learn about a set of facts relevant to the skills, such as descriptions of the procedure. The knowledge of how to carry out a pro

28、cedure is declarative, as step-by-step performance statements. At this point the learners generate actions through interpretations of the verbal statements, and carefully monitor the results of the actions when they carry out each step of the procedures. The processing in this stage is conscious, de

29、liberate, slow and requires full attention.2) Associative Stage:The major development of this stage is knowledge compilation. The compilation process is aimed to produce successful procedures in order to speed up the execution of procedures, drop the verbal rehearsal and eliminate piecemeal applicat

30、ion. During the associative stage, we have in the process of composition and proceduralization a means of converting declarative facts into production form. Composition is the process of organizing a series of actions together into a unified production. This produces considerable speedup by composin

31、g sequences of steps into one single action. Also, once the skill is proceduralized, the new integrated production no longer requires the domain specific declarative information to be retrieved into working memory. An important consequence of proceduralization is that it reduces the load on working

32、memory, and thus achieves a great deal of efficiency.3) Autonomous Stage:After a skill has been compiled into a task-specific procedure, the learning process involves an improvement in the search for the right production. In this stage, the procedure becomes more and more automated and rapid. The pr

33、ocess underlying this stage is tuning. Three learning mechanisms serve as the basis of tuning: generalization, discrimination, and strengthening.In the cognitive stage, students devote intensive attention to rules and perform the skill deliberately and, most likely, with many errors. They observe and imitate the expert perfo