A Study On Problems And Countermeasures In English Reading In Northeast Yucai Senior High School

The reform of English teaching calls on a higher demand to the English teaching and learning in a Senior High School. Improving students'reading ability is one of the objectives of English teaching in Senior High School. But in fact, many students'reading ability is far below where they should be and the discrepancy turns to be greater. And this has drawn attention of many English researchers in this field. Based on the research of the Senior 1 students in Yucai High School, this thesis explores the problems of English reading and tries to find out the countermeasures. This thesis consists of five sections.The first section is the introduction of literature review. It mainly introduces the learning strategies, the definitions of learning strategies and the classifications of language learning strategies. And it also introduces the traditional views on reading comprehension and the cognitive views in the field of reading.The second section is the theoretical framework. In this part, some reading theories are introduced: the top-down approach; the bottom–up approach; the interactive approach and the schema theory.The third section is about the research methodology. This is an experimental research. 44 Senior 1 students were chosen as the subjects for research. The results show that a lower percentage of students use reading strategies in reading activities. So students'reading ability is not as good as expected. The results also show that reading strategies are almost neglected in English teaching.In the fourth section, the research shows that there are some problems in reading comprehension, which are mainly in two aspects: the problems reflected in English teaching and the problems reflected in students'learning. In English teaching, there remain some problems: teaching with the old ideas; lack of training of the reading skills; lack of guidance of reading after class. And in students'learning, there are also some problems remained. For example, lacking of enough reading strategies; lacking of good reading habits; lacking of the background information; lacking of interest.In the fifth section, some countermeasures are introduced. For example, cultivating students'reading skills; identifying the types or the structures of the articles; analyzing the long sentences; accumulating and applying synthetical knowledge; recognizing word skills; and identifying the topic sentence. In addition, in the English teaching, we should cultivate the interest of reading and accumulate background information by encouraging students to do more practice.To sum up, lack of reading strategies is one of the main factors which lead to the failure of the reading comprehension. Both the teachers and the students should stress the importance of English reading and should pay attention to reading strategies in order to improve the level of reading comprehension.