A Study On Developing Senior Students’ English Autonomous Reading Ability

The new national English Curriculum (2005) claims that "the goals of senior English teaching are to improve learning methods and promote senior students’ autonomous learning ability". One of the reading requirements for level seven demands a reading of texts of at least300,000words while level eight at least360,000words. Meanwhile the new national English Curriculum expands the range of learning resources and opportunities available and strives to use and develop resources whose contents are realistic, close to students’lives, contemporary, healthy, rich and varied. At present, faced with the final exam, senior students want to get high marks in limited time, but they can’t read out of class autonomously or they lack proper reading strategies and skills or they lack colorful reading materials. Autonomous reading has become a hot issue in educational field in the past twenty years. In a word,21st century is an era of high technology and an era of knowledge, information and learning with knowledge and information increasing as fast as possible. In the era of new challenge, autonomous reading is the main approach to gaining information, dealing with information and analyzing and solving problems. In order to keep the pace of information era and adapt to the new development of society, school education should attach the importance to senior students’ autonomous reading ability to gain and deal with knowledge and information for lifelong learning.Autonomous learning can date from Socrates in ancient Greece. In the1970s, a group of English language experts tried to define autonomy. The author of the thesis adopts "autonomous learning" given by Henri Holec. Namely, the essence of learner autonomy is the ability to take charge of one’s own learning. In China, teaching how to learn is more important than teaching what to learn. In the early20th century, Cai Yuanpei holds that students should do research autonomously. In the late1990s, student-centre replaced teacher-centre. With the direction of many language experts and their experience, the author did the research on how to develop senior students’English autonomous reading ability.Thanks to the experimental class10and control class14in Dawan high school, Qing Baijiang District, Chengdu, this paper aims at exploring five ways of developing high school students’ English autonomous reading ability, which are based on the theory of constructivism theory, autonomous learning theory and the zone of proximal development theory. The author uses questionnaires to investigate the present situation of senior students’ English autonomous reading, including teachers’ teaching problems and students’ learning problems. On the one hand senior teachers lack reading theories and some of them don’t know constructivism theory, autonomous learning theory and the zone of proximal development theory. On the other hand, some teachers only teach language points instead of framework of the passage. The majority of teachers translate the passage sentence by sentence and they don’t guide students to grasp the summary. Some teachers don’t demand that students should analyze writer’s purpose and original ideas, thus it’s difficult for students to infer indirect information or choose the best title. Meanwhile teachers ignore background knowledge. English reading is multi-cultural communication among different countries. So teachers should introduce customs, religion, culture, history, background, geography and psychology to senior students. Only when senior students are input enough reading materials and apply reading strategies to reading practice can they improve their reading ability. Unfortunately, senior students are lack of enough autonomous reading.Then the author puts forward five training ways to develop senior high school students’ emotion and perseverance in reading strategies and reading skills. Firstly, developing senior students’proper reading attitude; secondly, providing colorful and wonderful reading materials for senior students; thirdly, instructing senior students on reading strategies and skills; fourthly, develop autonomous reading ability in class; fifthly, developing autonomous reading ability out of class.Meanwhile the author uses the experimental methods for more than two years to test the effectiveness of the training ways. At the end of the experiment, it proves that senior high students’ autonomous English reading abilities have been developed and improved.