Experimental Study On Developing Reading Fluency In EFL Through Repeated Reading

In order to enhance English majors'reading ability, effectively accomplish the reading target, reading strategy training is very significant.As far as Chinese college students majoring in English are concerned, how to improve English reading fluency and overall learning ability has been increasingly valued by the scholars. Reading fluency involves rate, automaticity, correct words recognition. If the readers lack the competence of words recognition, they can not effectively activate the related background knowledge and the ability of flexibly utilizing reading skills.A lot of empirical studies indicate that many researchers have focused on the nature of reading fluency, the relationship between fluency and comprehension, and effective approaches in improving reading fluency. It has been approved that repeated reading can efficiently improve L1 students'reading fluency and comprehension. Meanwhile, recent studies show that repeated reading can also improve L2/FL students'reading fluency and comprehension. However. so far, the subjects of the foreign researchers' experiment are all elementary school or secondary school students, and most of reading materials are stories. In China, there are few studies concerning the effects of repeated reading in English teaching. Therefore, in terms of the further research on the relationship between reading fluency and repeated reading, and the summarization of the literature review at home and abroad, this thesis explored how to apply repeated reading into improving English majors'reading fluency and utilizing the study result to answer the questions:(1) Can students be helped to acquire fluency through repeated reading? (2) Can fluency training improve the students'reading proficiency? The results indicated that, comparing with the traditional extensive reading, repeated reading did improve the students'reading fluency and comprehension, especially the unsuccessful students'reading ability, and it was accepted and praised by students. Finally, the author pointed out the limitations of the study and put forward suggestions for further research.