A Psycholinguistic Analysis On English Reading Difficulty Of Chinese College Students

This paper aims to analyze the reasons attributing to Chinese college students'reading difficulty from a psycholinguistic point of view, and propose some suggestions for the reading teachers to help the students overcome these difficulties and to improve the future teaching of college English reading.This paper is composed of six chapters:Chapter I is the introduction to the theoretical background and purpose of the present study. It discusses some misconceptions on Chinese college students'reading level and points out that the current college students'reading ability is far from satisfaction.Chapter II is a psycholinguistic account of reading comprehension. It gives a general literature review of two major psycholinguistic theories related to reading comprehension: schema theory and metacognition theory, and discusses their concepts, types and significance in reading comprehension respectively. This part lays the theoretical foundation of the present study.Chapter III is the psycholinguistic analysis of reading difficulty. It applies the psycholinguistic theories into the Chinese college students'reading practice and analyzes the reasons attributing to those difficulties based on the results of a survey. The data from the survey show that students at different grades consider the difficulty degree of the same factor differently.Chapter IV is the empirical study of college students'reading difficulty. Four experiments are carried out to check whether lack of appropriate schema and low metacognitive ability constitute major reasons for the college students'English reading difficulty. The encouraging results justify the purposes of those experiments and are in correspondence with the theoretical analysis in Chapter III. They also give us some specific indications as to the more effective way in enhancing linguistic schema or content schema. This part serves as the experimental support of the present study.