Difficulty And Its Causes In Reading Comprehension Of Junior High School Students And The Suggestions

It is very important for Chinese students to improve their reading abilities. Reading is not only one of the four basic skills but also an important means of learning English. However, not many students go smoothly in reading. Many students, especially the lower grade students, have little interest in English reading. They have no good reading habits or essential reading strategies. They have difficulty in reading comprehension. So I feel it necessary to find out what difficulty the students have while they are reading and what causes the difficulty. What we teachers can do is to help them overcome the difficulty, to cultivate their good reading habits and to develop their basic reading strategies.Since 1960s, the reading theories have been greatly developed in western countries. Generally speaking, there are four kinds of reading theories. 1. Bottom-up model theory represented by Cough. 2. Top-down model theory represented by Goodman.3.Interactive-model represented by Rumelhart. 4. Schema theory represented by Carrell. The interactive-model theory and schema theory influence a lot on reading teaching.From the study of the cognitive psychologists, we know that the readers have difficulty in reading is mainly because they lack linguistic schema, content schema and rhetorical schema. Meanwhile, in order tounderstand the troubles my students have in their readmg and make my reading teaching more effective and more practical, I made a questionair on the basis of Professor Zhou Shuqing's to find out what difficulty the students have while they are reading, how they read and what their reading interest really is. Now we know that the lower grade students have reading difficulty is mainly because they lack linguistic schema, content schema and also because they lack good reading habits and have wrong reading psychology.So far, I have adjusted my reading teaching methods in accordance with their shortages. 1. Developing the students' reading strategies in class, enhancing vocabulary teaching and the introduction of foreign cultural background . 2. Putting the students' improper readmg habits and reading psychology right, cultivating the students' fast reading skills. 3. Organizing reading groups and setting up reading portfolios.After one year's study and teaching practice, now my students show more interest in English reading and their reading skills have already been improved. I hope this thesis will be of some help to the classroom teachers.