A New Attempt To Teach College English Reading

Among the four skills of reading, speaking, listening, writing in English teaching, reading is usually regarded as one of the most important one, because reading is the most basic method to gain social knowledge by the modem people and the most important way to acquire information, to study and entertain. The necessity of teaching of English reading is generally admitted. And the development of English reading comprehension is the basic content of college English reading teaching. English reading has been paid great attention to. However, the teaching result is not so satisfactory because it cannot conform to the expectations both from the teaching side and the learning side.Until now, the reading teaching model has gone through the traditional reading teaching model-bottom-up model, the integral scheme reading model -the interactive processing model, and the discourse-based reading teaching model of the current stage. They all have their own advantages, and they have ever contributed a lot to the teaching of reading. However, all these three above have their own deficiencies. In all, they cannot satisfy the requirement of the current college English reading teaching.On the basis of the CELT curriculum, and absorbing the elite of the above three reading teaching models, we attempt to set up a new one - the discourse-based task reading teaching model. It is a college English reading teaching model built on the theoretical foundation of the metacognitive strategies, discourse theory, scheme theory, memorizing theory, emphasizing the understanding of the discourse features (such as the context theory, the theme structure, the text type, the text pattern, the text strategy, etc), the integral understanding which combines the macroscopic reading and microcosmicreading together and emphasizing the accomplishment of different tasks in different parts of the reading process. And it aims to develop the students' reading competence and communicative competence. The task teaching model has the characteristics as follows: it emphasizes setting reading tasks for the readers; it emphasizes the discourse-leveled comprehension without ignoring the language knowledge and the grammar points and developing the students' reading competence; it combines the macroscopic reading and microcosmic reading at the same time; it is student-centered, tries to train the students' self-leaning ability and finally it emphasizes the material of input and develops the students' output ability.The discourse-based teaching reading model can roughly be divided into three parts or three tasks and every task includes three parts: task setting, task accomplishing and task evaluation. Task one (pre-reading activities) is mainly to activate the background knowledge and to predict the content of the reading material by introducing the background knowledge and explaining the new words and important expressions. Task two (while-reading activities) includes three reading processes: the integration reading process, the reasoning process and the general reading process. Task three (after-reading activities) is mainly to review the whole text and detailed language points and gives feedback to the reading process.And then the discourse-based task reading teaching model is applied into practical teaching. After the probe and analysis of the teaching results and the tests and questionnaires, we come to a conclusion that the discourse-based task reading teaching model is feasible and efficient. However, it is not perfect and it has its own deficiencies. At the end of the dissertation, some analysis and suggestions to improve the current situation of college English reading teaching are given.