The Research On English Newspapers Reading And Cultivating The Reading Interest Of Senior High School Students

English reading is one of essential tasks of English teaching in high schools. It is also an important means of learning English. However, not many students can read English efficiently. Many high school students, especially those in the ordinary high schools, have little interest in English reading. They lack good reading habits or essential reading strategies. They have difficulty in reading comprehension. So it is necessary to find out what difficulties the students have while they are reading and what causes the difficulties, in order to help them overcome the difficulties, cultivate their reading interest, form good reading habits and develop their basic reading strategies.The findings of psychological studies show that the following three variables significantly influence readers' information processing when they are reading. They are writer variables, text variables and reader variables. In order to know the troubles the students have in their reading, a questionnaire is conducted on the basis of the questions designed by Professor Zhou Shuqing to identify what difficulty the students have, how they read and what their reading interest really is. The results of the survey indict, in terms of the schema theory, that the senior high school students' reading difficulty stems from: 1. lack of linguistic schema, 2. lack of content schema, 3. lack of good reading habits and appropriate reading process, 4. the stereotyped teaching method and 5. the negative impact of College Entrance Examination on English learning.As a remedy for the problems stated above, English newspaper reading program is introduced into the English class. The program includes two parts: in-class reading and after-class reading. After-class reading is mainly devoted to helping the students make notes (the important new words, good sentences and rewriting one favorite passage). Moreover, their reading interest is further aroused by means of: enhancing the students' awareness of the importance of efficient reading cognitively and affectively, establishing effective ways of evaluation, and playing games. In in-class reading, the students are encouraged to exchange their notebooks about reading newspapers once a week, practice reading strategies, enlarge their vocabulary and learn the target cultural backgroundAfter one term's experiment, now the students are much interested in English reading and their reading skills have greatly improved. It is hoped that this thesis will be a reference for later researchers, and will be of some help to the classroom teachers.