Facilitation Of Reading Proficiency Through Student-Centered Classroom Activities

Reading is an active process and in the teaching of reading it is far from enough to teach just the language points in the reading text. To help non-English-major college students improve reading proficiency in College English reading classes, it is essential to get them engaged in the reading process and get them to actively participate in student-centered classroom activities which focus on the needs and abilities of students in the aspects of designing, implementation, and assessment of these activities. Reading proficiency in this thesis is defined as consisting of vocabulary power, syntactic knowledge, literal reading skills, interpretive reading skills, critical reading skills, creative reading skills, and strategic reading skills. To improve students' reading proficiency, it is recommended that student-centered classroom activities be designed on the basis of the reading theory — schema theory, a typical representation of interactive reading models. In this study, before reading, pre-reading activities are designed to activate students' preexisting schema knowledge and help them make predictions about the text they are going to read; during reading, while-reading activities are designed to enhance students' interaction with the text and help them apply and reconstruct their schema knowledge; after reading, post-reading activities are designed to strengthen their schema knowledge. Meanwhile, communicative language teaching approach and cooperative learning method are integrated into the classroom activities. To test the effect of such classroom activities, an experimental study is done in a class and a questionnaire survey is conducted among the subjects. The results of the study indicate that students' reading proficiency can be facilitated more greatly by getting them to be actively engaged in such classroom activities than by means of the traditional teaching method.