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The Communicative Approach In College English Reading Teaching

Posted on:2003-12-13Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:L J LiuFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360062950397Subject:English Language and Literature
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
For many years, people have realized the significance of reading teaching in FLT, they have different opinions on effective and efficient reading results. The traditional reading method "bottom-up model" has long dominated in College English reading teaching. People thought meaning came from the text itself, readers could get meaning by decoding the text sentence by sentence passively. With the development of applied linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, people found reading was not a passive decoding process, but an active and productive "guess-confirm" process (Goodman 1970), an interactive communication process. In this thesis, the present author deems that indeed effective and efficient reading should be a process of communication between readers and writers, reading teaching and learning should involve communicative activities. First, readers choose some materials to read, they must have some communicative desire, that is, they want to understand the text or get some information from the text, and they want to find out what the writers are conveying. As for the writers, they write manuscripts assuming that there will be readers one day, they want to charm their readers. To attain the communicative purpose, writers may select the language that they think is most appropriate to convey their meaning. While the readers may be prepared to process a great variety of grammar and vocabulary to understand exactly what is being said. Thus, the nature of reading is a communication. Second, in the process of reading, readers hope to get maximum information with a minimum of misunderstanding. They may seek the most direct path to meaning, using all kinds of strategies to reduce uncertainty. They are selective about the use of the cues available and are dependent on their knowledge. In their mind, they may activate a range of knowledge and which in turn, may be refined and extended by the new information supplied by the text. Reading is thus a land of dialogue between the readers and the text. Therefore, theprocess of reading is an active, dynamic and functional communicative act. In the thesis, the present author suggests that to make the results more effective in the communicative reading teaching, teachers should try to help students widen their schemata knowledge by supplying background and cross-culture introductions and reading materials, cultivate their contextual and functional consciousness, strengthen the discourse and genre analysis and so on. Finally, after finishing the reading process, students should have a kind of creative and initiative ability to use what they have got and learned from the class in actual life reading.This thesis first makes a general description of the present College English reading teaching in China, pointing out that the traditional teaching approach in reading should be improved, for it is too "teacher-centered" to be any good for effective reading and communicative efficiency of the learners. Then it gives a general survey on communicative competence and the nature of reading, deals with the theoretical basis schema theory, bottom-up model, top-down model and interactive model for this communicative reading teaching process. Next, the suggested reading stages in teaching are discussed in detail. To arouse the students' reading interest, activate their reading motivation, teachers should do many pre-reading preparations such as introducing background knowledge, the cross-culture learning tasks and so on. In the while-reading stage, teachers can organize many communicative tasks, which are students-centered and knowledge-based. To facilitate the interaction between students and students, students can finish the tasks in pairs or groups. To consolidate the communicative results, some post-reading check-up exercises which are performance-based are suggested in this thesis. Lastly, by exploring and analyzing a text in College English Textbook One, it draws the conclusion that the communicative teaching is an effective and efficient way in College English reading...
Keywords/Search Tags:Communicative Competence, Schema Theory, Interactive Model, College English Communicative Reading Teaching
PDF Full Text Request
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