Enlightenment Of Narrow Reading On College English Ex-curricular Reading

It has been a focus of much concern, in the modern foreign language teaching, to help students develop a fine reading ability. This thesis aims to discuss how to effectively improve students'reading comprehension under an ex-curricular reading model---Narrow Reading.Narrow Reading, firstly proposed by Krashen early in 1981, is a reading strategy which advocates reading on the same topics, books by the same author, and /or in the same genre. In other words, it means to read articles under the same topic or in the same genre extensively. It is supposed that students'reading comprehension and interest would be improved as their accumulation of background knowledge being enlarged. However, there are few studies about Narrow Reading so far, especially the empirical ones. And there is a blank to conduct empirical experiment for science students in independent colleges.Enlightened by both the previous researches and relevant reading theories, in the present study, we carry out an empirical experiment with the students majoring in Electronics and Information Engineering &Machinery Designing and Construction Engineering in two innate classes. The empirical experiment lasted 8 weeks. It is founded, that the students in these two classes, before the experiment, share a similar attitude toward ex-curricular reading though their English proficiency weren't on the same level. Independent-Samples T-test and Paired-Samples T-test were performed in this study to evaluate the effect of Narrow Reading in terms of reading habits and attitude towards autonomous reading outside class.Data analysis are performed though EXCELL and SPSS10.5, which has demonstrated that Narrow Reading has a certain effect on students'reading attitudes .Concretely, the students in the experimental class (1) had a better awareness of the necessity and importance of reading; (2) invested more time in ex-curricular reading and showed a greater interest in reading and (3) recognized and developed a certain useful reading skills, like grasping key words and making notes and so on.Some enlightenment can be drawn from the results of the experiment. Firstly, Narrow Reading is a great generalized model in reading instruction of college English; reading quality should be paid enough attention as much as reading quantity; students are encouraged to obtain as much relevant information as they can within a specific theme to set up an effective schema network in reading comprehension. It's crucial to cultivate good reading habits for stimulating students'reading interest and developing skills.