University English Students' Reading Achievement Factors

Reading played an important part in foreign language teaching. Reading is not only a multi-level cognitive activity, but also a process of emotion and conciousness. Many researchers considered the factors are various, which affect the reading process. English reading process exists two variables: readers variables and discourse variables. These variables will have an impact on reading comprehension. The author made a survey on these factors in several universities in Harbin. They are Heilongjiang University, the South Campus of Heilongjiang University, Harbin University of Science and Technology, Harbin Normal University. The result shows that the main factors are vocabulary, reading time, psychology, meta-cognition and background knowledge. According to schema theory , meta-cognitive theory and other related theories, the author analyzed how these factors influence the result in the course of English reading and discussed how to reduce the negative impact of these factors, thus improving the English reading teaching.