The Application Of Pre-structure Theory To English Reading In Senior High Schools

Owing to the role as well as the current status of senior high English reading, reading teaching has been the main concern of English teachers all the time. As one of the four basic language learning activities being listening, speaking, reading and writing, reading serves as the most primary and the most comprehensive one. What's more, as one of the social activities, reading turns out to be an indispensable information-absorbing means. Today, we are living in an era of information explosion and all-round globalization, where about 80%of the information is conveyed in English. During the whole course of English teaching, reading occupies much more time and teachers and students make great efforts, however, the result is not satisfactory. In such an environment, to improve students'reading ability becomes unprecedently important.Attempting to help to better the current senior high school reading class, the author tries to apply Pre-structure theory to reading teaching.This paper briefly introduces the current status of senior high school reading teaching and the standard our senior high school students should reach. Meanwhile, the author analyze the problems that exist in the reading teaching. English reading teaching is often regarded as a form to teach language points in order to meet with NMET. Teachers emphasize on teaching and explaining to students pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar. They neglect the content of articles and mistake English reading for a simple thing---only if you know words and grammar, you can do reading. That is the reason why students can not read efficiently. In order to improve English reading method, I attempt to apply pre-structure theory to guide students in grade two in senior high school.Pre-structure theory mixes traditional cognitive ideas with modern psychological ideas, which contains general pre-structure and linguistic pre-structure. It describes reading process as : during the reading comprehension, not only visual information but non-visual information are important. Visual information refers to something you use your eyes to feel the words while non-visual information plays an potential role during reading process; It comes from your brain. Reading psychologist defined non-visual information as"something behind your eyes."Actually, it is the sum of students'total knowledge: the master to social cultural background of English-speaking countries, the familiarity level towards the reading material, personal living experience, common sense and so on. If you can understand what you read, that is the information stored in your mind that help you understand the hidden meaning behind words. As an English teacher, we should use pre-structure theory help and guide students to read efficiently, to cultivate students form a kind of ability to use and build his own pre-structure language.This reading research carried out in class 5,6 Grade two in Changchun No.12 middle school. At the beginning of this paper, the author propose 3 questions, whether using pre-structure in reading teaching can improve students'ability in the following aspects?1. Will the application of pre-structure theory improve students'ability to deal with predictive questions?2. Will the application of pre-structure theory improve students'ability to guess and understand the words meaning?3. Will the application of pre-structure theory improve students'reading rate?In order to draw a conclusion, the author carefully designed the research process, adopting the following two research method:1) questionnaire 2) test. The process includes the application and carryout of the pre-structure theory besides the two times tests. And then I collected the data, analyze and compare the change during the two tests of the same class. The result indicates: the application of pre-structure theory in class 6 worked out better. The average scores and reading rate are obviously higher than those of class 5.The results and the feedbacks of the research are expected to imply something to Chinese English teachers. Though this research can be considered successful to a great extent, it has some limitations. Thus this paper is expected to inspire a further discussion about this subject.