A Three-principle Approach To The Teaching Of Intensive Reading To Chinese Adults

Adults differ from preadults in a number of important ways that affect learning and, consequently, how they approach learning. Therefore, the traditional pedagogical model is inappropriate for use with adults and teaching adults should differ from teaching children and adolescents.The adults possess rich life experience, which brings about a great deal of background knowledge in their mind. Because reading is an interactive and compensatory process, the abundant background knowledge strongly assists the adults when their low-level decoding ability can not resolve certain complex problems in English reading. For the adults' teachers, the thorny problem may be that adult students tend to be passive in class.The writer proposes that the English teachers try a three-principle approach, which demands that teachers give intensive reading lessons to adults following three principles: First, make full use of the adult students' rich background knowledge. Second, train the students to master various reading skills as well as the linguistic knowledge. Third, carry out various activities to get the adult students active in class. The three-principle approach can make the passive adult students more active in English reading lessons as well as improve their intensive reading abilities. In order to efficiently apply the three principles to the teaching practice, the teachers had better pay attention to the following aspects: Firstly, the selected reading materials should be about the topics that the students are familiar with or interested in. Secondly, the teachers should train the various reading skills systematically, keeping the students informed of the goal of every activity. Thirdly, the teacher should design the activities which are appropriate for his students by himself as well as adopt those invented by other researchers.