The Effects Of The Use Of Multimedia On College Students' Fast Reading Competence

For a long time, the topic of reading has been viewed as a critical issue for both first and second language educators and researchers. It is a complex psychological procedure which contains cognition, interpretation, abstraction and application. Especially in the information explosion age, new knowledge growing so fast, it is significant to cultivate the fast reading skills to college students. In order to achieve the goal, the application of fast reading strategies is very important.Since some universities and middle schools were appointed to launch pilot projects for the application of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), the research about CALL has been the hot topic in the field of foreign language teaching. Nowadays, much attention is paid to the research and practice into CALL in the world. Compared with foreign countries, the research on the applications of CALL in China, especially on the teaching of reading, is less developed. In this case, the ideas in this paper are significant to the improvement of teaching efficiency, to the all-round heightening of students'quality, and the enhancement of English teachers'ability of utilizing teaching resources.Theory analysis and experiment are combined to carry out this research. And the theoretical foundations are Piaget's social constructivism and Krashen's comprehensible input theory. At first, in order to procure a preliminary understanding of learning strategies, reviews have been made concerning three aspects of learning strategies: definitions, classifications, and some studies of learning strategies. Questionnaire, teaching strategy and fast reading tests are adopted in the experiment. 60 second-year English major undergraduates in Qin Huangdao Vocational Technological Institute participated in the experiment to explore the effect of one semester's training of the learning strategies on fast reading. The experiment group consists of 30 undergraduates from Class 1; the control group includes 30 students from Class 2. The variables such as age, gender, native language and vocabulary level were controlled so as not to cloud the results. In the control group, students receive the fast reading strategies, while the experiment group activities are connected with fast reading strategies using multimedia in the classroom. Three instruments (the questionnaire, fast reading proficiency test and classroom observation) are employed to acknowledge students'fast reading barriers and to solve the problems with the fast reading strategies. The result and the data of experiment were analyzed in quantity and quality.Traditionally, few exercises were rarely adopted to train the eyes'input ability so as to attain enhancement in fast-reading. This thesis suggests a technique that was based on the findings in neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics. It supplements the traditional fast reading approaches by using exercises to train the eyes and brain to improve reading performance. It has tried a new approach in teaching and learning fast-reading as well as applied the theories of linguistics into teaching practice.