A Survey Of The Grade Two Students' Status Quo In English Reading In Hunyuan Senior Middle School

Reading is an effective approach to study the English language and improve the learners' (EFL) language competence of English, and it is also an important way to learn about the world. In the past century, many scholars and teachers have been carrying out a lot of studies in probing the essence of English reading and its psychological process, teaching models, skills and techniques and they have made certain progress in some areas. In China's elementary education, to improve the students' ability to read in English is one of the most important objectives in English teaching and English reading is among the most important contents and methods in their English language learning. The students in Hunyuan Senior Middle School have made much greater progress than ever before in their English language learning as a result of their teachers' refoim in English teaching since the new textbooks of SEFC were in use in 1996. However, more and more students have found that there is even greater gap between their English reading ability and what is required in the college English teaching. Meanwhile, the newly published National Criterion of English Curriculum for General Senior Middle Schools stresses the students' abilities of decoding the English language and of logical inference from context. It requests the students to cultivate a wide interest in English reading and a good habit of it. The new criterion stresses the students' abilities of analysis, perception, and judgment, and develops the students' abilities to using a wider resource in their English language learning. All this advances new challenges to the teaching of English reading in senior middle schools. This paper introduces a questionnaire, a vocabulary test and an interview to survey the grade two students' status quo in English reading in Hunyuan Senior Middle School. The survey involves the students' vocabulary, aims to read, reading process, reading strategies, their attitude towards reading in English and factors that affect their comprehension in English reading.The survey shows that the senior grade two students' English reading characters as follows: (1) the students are lacking in scheme and consecution in English reading as they are forced to read now; (2) the students make more use of such strategies as word and sentence analysis, inferring and judgment in the reading process while at the same time they mostly think in Chinese, yet their ability to analyze English sentence structures are poor and theirability to infer and judge needs to be improved; (3) the students have a comparatively strong desire to read the English materials they are interested in, but they are far beyond fluent English readers; (4) the students are expecting their English teachers to teach them efficient ways of reading in English and to train them skills in English reading , however, they are reluctant to ask their English teachers or to turn to their classmates when they have difficulty in their English reading, let alone to be monitored by their teachers in their reading. The survey also shows that there are some problems to be settled soon in the teaching of English reading in mis school: (1) English reading teaching rests only on the superficial understanding of passages and lacks in a deep comprehension of it; (2) English reading teaching is short of necessary grammatical analysis; (3) the English teachers lay particular stress on the contents of the reading materials instead of the necessary guidance of efficient ways to read in English; (4) the teachers have a partiality for the knowledge of the English language rather than the cultivation of the students' emotion.Based on the survey, the paper puts forward to three particular integrations to optimize the teaching of English reading in this school: (1) Integration the initiation of the English language knowledge with efficient ways to read in English so as to improve the students' comprehensive English language abilities besides the ability to think in English: that is the teachers of English should provide...