The Application Of Effective Reading Methods To The Improvement Of The Reading Skill

Reading ability is one of the basic language skills that requested by National Curriculum Standards. For Chinese students, reading has become the most important skill in English learning because it is the most common way through which the students are exposed to the target language, so it is the most and effective way to study foreign language. The traditional Sentence-Text-Analysis method or the teacher-centered method is still widely used in the teaching of reading. Along with the education reform, the purpose of English education is changed into teaching the students how to learn, how to develop, and how to acquire the ability of life-long learning, more and more educators pay great attention to research of improving the reading skills. Therefore, the question of how to use the reading materials properly to improve students' reading skill and reading ability in senior middle school is worth considering.There are various reading methods for students to read. The paper introduces six effective reading methods to illustrate how to train reading skills and the reading ability. First, use context to help students to guess the new words in context. We know thatlanguage rely on the context, meanwhile, the context can offer many clues to help students understand the passage further. Second, familiarity with the writing style can help students to find the important points and get an accurate comprehension of the material. Different materials have different writing styles. If students can not recognize the writing style, they will feel in the dark while reading. By using this, teachers can train students' skimming and scanning skill and their reading speed. Third, interactively reading. In other words, reading becomes a kind of dialogue between teachers and students. In class, teachers and students exchange views and students evaluate themselves. As a result, students play active roles in the class. Fourth, reading cooperatively. It is an effective methods to involve students in reading. There are many advantages of this method. For instance, students read the passages on their own initiative; good students can help others. Thus, every student has reading tasks during the study. Fifth, abundant background knowledge. The reader's background knowledge is an important factor to reading comprehension. According to Schema theory,. background knowledge can help readers to establish a schema of the material. More background knowledge the readers have, more quickly they understand the material. Finally, enlarging language material inputs. It help students to read the material fluently and to obtain the information quickly. The important key of this is that teacher must choose some real materials.To sum up, it is very important to apply effective reading methods in the teaching of reading. The research of reading methods contributes not only to the theoretical development of language teaching, but also to improvement of the quantity of teaching and reading skills. As teachers, we should size the key contents of the reading, apply the learning contents to the real application, and merge language form and language function into an integral whole. As a consequence, teachers can help students to improve the reading skills and comprehensive ability.This paper consists of six parts.Chapter One is an introduction. It introduces the importance and the necessity of the research.Chapter Two is concerned with the state of the research of reading theories and it interprets the research of the reading theories.Chapter Three analyses the psychological process of reading and the purposes of theteaching of reading.Chapter Four concentrates on the requirement proposed by of National Curriculum Standards and makes a further analysis.Chapter Five offers sample activities to illustrate how to apply the effective methods to improve the reading ability and reading skills.Chapter Six is the conclusion and it points out the importance of using effective reading methods to improve reading skill.