Language Forms: The Focus Of Teaching English Reading Comprehending In Secondary Schools Of Rural Areas

Since the beginning of reform and opening-up,the circle of foreign language teaching in China has been absorbing from abroad tremendous research achievements on foreign language learning and teaching,such as "The Direct Method," "The oral Approach," "The Audio-lingual Method," "The Communicative Language Teaching" approach...and so on.Among them,"The Communicative Language Teaching" approach(Hereafter the CLT approach) characterized by "task-based teaching" has been playing a leading role in our country.The CLT approach has overcome the disadvantages of traditional methods,which only focus on language forms.It resets the goal of language learning---to serve people's interaction and communication.It stresses that learning forms or rules of language should cater to the needs of people's communication,and developing one's communicative competence with the learned language has become the core of language learning.However,overemphasizing "communicative competence",particularly in the initial stages of language learning in certain areas has also thrown negative impacts on language development.It causes neglecting language forms when reading and gives rise to the fact that their communicative competence acquired in this approach could only be operated within some simple and rudimentary syntactic structures,and this,of course,will inevitably hinder students' further study and their language use abilities.Unfortunately,this has become a common phenomenon in foreign language teaching and learning circle, especially in rural and mountainous areas.This thesis makes an exploration into nature of reading,taking the view that reading comprehending teaching and learning in secondary schools in our country,especially in those poorly equipped schools in rural areas should focus on language forms,the reasons for which are:1.Reading for foreign language learning differs from that for information obtaining.2. Understanding of text contents in a foreign language doesn't necessarily mean the acquisition of that language 3.Knowledge of forms of a foreign language in the settings in question is the prerequisite for one's,language acquisition.4.The characteristics of secondary school students have determined that the reading comprehending lessons given to them should focus on language forms.On the other hand,our proposal of form-focused teaching does not mean to return to the traditional Grammar-Translation Method,because there are huge differences between them. Specifically,they differ in respects of their contents,the sequences of teaching,the design and organization of classroom activities,teachers and students' roles in the teaching and learning,and the design and compilation of teaching materials.Among all language forms,issues of pronunciation,vocabulary and grammar are of crucial importance to students' English learning in secondary schools and thus become the key points of their focus.Towards the end of the article,a complete teaching case of reading comprehension is given to present,on the basis of an overall comprehending of the text contents,how we should guide students to study,consolidate and ultimately master the newly-emerged language forms in the text by way of contexts, so as to lay a sound foundation for their further study and advanced application.We take the position that in the reading comprehending classes for secondary schools in china,instruction with conscious focus on language forms in the particular setting we discuss in this thesis is possibly more efficient than that proposed by some western scholars to have students acquire the language naturally just by extensive reading.In the conclusion,it is pointed out that the writer of the thesis is not unaware of the danger of proposing such a form-focus approach to teaching English reading, particularly in schools like his.In the trend of the CLT still gaining momentum,the proposal that has been made in the thesis sounds very reactionary and he himself believes that this thesis will raise more problems or controversies rather than solve any disputes.He is therefore in the hope of receiving critical comments or suggestions that might help further shape the ideas that is embodied in the thesis or might simply dismiss the proposal he has made so that he can make further reflections on it.