On The Reading Instruction For The College Non-English Majors

Undoubtedly, reading is one of the most important ways of language learning. The foreign language reading and its instruction have got a wide range of attraction from the relevant researchers and educators. In recent years, the study of linguistic theories has spurred on the foreign languages teaching research in many aspects and produced a far-reaching influence on the reading instruction. With the development of the research of psycholinguistics and applied linguistics, the reading research has switched from the words recognition, grammatical analysis and sentence explanation to the interactive approach of language knowledge, language skills practice and background knowledge learning. It should be pointed out that reading is a complicated process involving fast and secret cognitive activity in the brain. Three reading models have been proposed after a large amount of research on the reading process: the bottom-up reading model, the top-down reading model and the interactive reading model. In the first model, the lexical ability is overemphasized while the background knowledge and the discourse teaching are neglected. With excessive emphasis on the context and the pre-experiences in brain, the second model is apt to produce errors in the word recognition and reading comprehension. The interactive model is most widely accepted by most scholars and educators because it emphasizes on both the language skills and the psychological skills with the overall explanation of the complicated reading process and objectives. The reading strategy is one of the important parts of reading theories and instruction. "The reading strategy" is somewhat different from "the reading skill", because the former covers more aspects than the latter does. Reading strategies include not only some reading skills but also some selective and management activities to achieve the expected reading objectives. Instead of being confined to the sole reading activities such as scanning and skimming, the reading strategy research now is in the higher stage of the background knowledge activation and the cognitive strategy.But much erroneous understanding of how to teach "reading" still exists. For example, the overemphasis on the intensive reading and the neglect of the extensive reading result in the students' total attention to the learning of vocabularies and grammars in reading, and they can't have efficient reading practice. Another case in point is that the students' reading abilities fail to be well cultivated due to the overemphasis on the reading accuracy and the inefficient training of the reading speed. Consequently, most students have difficulty in reading English newspaper and magazines and in working out the standard English resume and job application letters even after their over ten years' English learning.Many factors, including the subjective ones on teachers and students' part and the objective ones in reality, can account for these problems. It is our urgent and important task to study on how to guide students to adopt reading strategies properly and efficiently, which is the very subject that the thesis discusses. After a brief review of reading theories and reading models both at home and abroad, the thesis gives a concise analysis of the reading instruction of college English. In order to have an objective view on the adoption of the reading strategies for the college non-English majors, the author conducts a case study of the reading strategies among 44 college non-English majors in the way of questionnaire and interview. By collecting the related data and information, the author analyzes their reading strategies in a systematic way. For the sake of getting a better comparison and analysis, the subjects are claasified into "successful readers" and "less successful readers". The objectives are to find out the differences and similarities of the adoption of reading strategies between the two groups so that the influences of reading strategies on reading comprehension and reading abilities can be tracked down...