A Survey Of Autonomous Reading Of Extra-curriculum In English Learning In Vocational Schools

Reading is an effective way of learning English as well as a necessary skill in English learning in China. Generally speaking, Chinese students lack interest in reading. The students are too dependent on the teachers and lack the ability of autonomous learning. Since the time of every lesson is limited, autonomous reading of extra-curriculum arose much interest of researchers as a way of improving the students' language ability and autonomous learning ability. The aim of this essay is to find out ways to develop the students' reading and learning ability by means of autonomous reading of extra-curriculum.The first and second parts of the essay state the concept of autonomous reading of extra-curriculum, the current situation of autonomous reading of extra-curriculum in China and the relevant surveys and experiments. The results of surveys and experiments show the possibility and necessity of autonomous reading of extra-curriculum as well as the problems and difficulties the Chinese students meet with in autonomous reading.The third part of the essay is mainly about the experiment of autonomous reading of extra-curriculum, including the subjects, the reading materials, the organization of autonomous reading of extra-curriculum, the tests of language ability and the teacher's help in reading. The forth part is the statistic analysis of the data of this experiment. After a year of learning, the students have improved their reading ability and autonomous learning ability. The experiment also discovered that the vocational school students like easy and interesting stories and that they need help in background knowledge as well as language knowledge and reading strategies.The last part of the essay is to conclude that autonomous reading of extra-curriculum is an effective way to develop and improve autonomous ability of language learning. During the process of reading, the students need teacher's help. First, the teacher should provide students with a variety of reading materials. Second, the teacher should encourage students to keep reading and make autonomous reading of extra-curriculum part of English learning. In this way can the students improve their reading ability. Besides, the teacher should combine reading ability with otherlanguage abilities with different reading activities to enhance the whole languageability.