College English Reading Comprehension And Pedagogical Strategies

At present, College English reading teaching confronts many problems: inadequate reading activities in class, enlarged class size, limited class hours and insufficient reading materials, which affect the improvement of college students' English reading comprehension. In order to investigate the current state of this, a reading comprehension test was conducted in Hunan Technology University, 130 sophomore students participated in the test. They are from four classes in different schools, representing students of liberal arts and science. The results showed that their reading comprehension level is generally low, and there is a sharp contrast between successful readers and poor readers. Reading comprehension is mainly influenced by essential factors like students, teachers, and textbooks. Students' reading motivation, strategies and styles react to each other and influence their reading comprehension. The teacher is a counselor, coordinator, organizer and assessor during the reading teaching. The textbook is a resource of reading teaching in and after class. Based on the concept that reading is by nature an interactive process of communication, the input-interactive- output model involving teachers and students is designed. Through a reading teaching experiment, the model is proved effectual. The results indicate that reading comprehension can be improved by increasing reading amount. However, based on the same reading amount, the class with interaction activities of reading output achieves evidently more improvement in reading comprehension.