The Study Of English Reading In Junior Middle School

Reading is a very important means to receive information. For second language learners, reading plays a vital role in expanding language knowledge, especially enriching vocabulary.Reading comprehension has always been one of the hot issues of the TEFL research. There are a lot of different viewpoints about it, such as "the Bottom-up Model" suggested by Gough, "the Top-down Model" proposed by Goodman and "the Interactive Model" offered by Rumelhart and so on. However, in the daily teachingpractices, some problems have been found in the reading instruction-theGrammar-translation Method has been over-used in class, which inhibits the students' enthusiasm in learning English. In the author's opinion, the key to a successful reading lesson lies in the way the teacher organizes the teaching processes, or in what way the teacher can help the learners acquire the reading skills.To search out an effective way of reading instruction, the author has conducted a teaching experiment in the junior middle school, with students in Grade Eight as the subjects. On the basis of the questionnaire, the characteristics of the proper reading comprehension texts have been discovered and the related materials have been collected. The results of the five-month experiment show that, compared with the traditional Grammar-translation Method, the eclectic use of Three-step Method, Reciprocal Reading Teaching Method, Advance Organizers Teaching Method, Paired-reading Method and Diagram Reading Method produces better effect on the development of the students' reading comprehension ability, especially such skills as predicting, understanding the general idea, guessing the meaning of the unknown words, acquiring the detailed information and inferring the author's intention of writing.