| Language is the most important communicative tool used to express, transfer,receive thoughts and feelings. Meanwhile, reading is not only the best method toextract effective information, but also the double fusion of language proficiency andcommunicative competence. There is an essential interaction between language andthought in reading. The writer encodes thought as language and the reader decodeslanguage to thought (Goodman,2006:12). As far as College English reading isconcerned, reading is one of the important skills to cultivate students’ comprehensivelanguage ability. At present, there are three popular models of reading teaching:Bottom-up Model, Top-down Model and Interactive Model. These three models playa vital role in helping non-English majors resolve some difficulties in reading, butthey are far from being the whole answer for the students in their reading. Accordingto the author’s observation in teaching practice, presently main factors that hinder thenon-English majors from appropriate understanding of the reading texts can beconcluded as follows:1) their vocabulary is insufficient;2) they feel esoteric andconfused to understand technical terms and concepts;3) their cultural contextknowledge is impoverished;4) they cannot grasp the semantic meaning of someexpressions in a reading text, which affects the result of understanding the text. Thefirst three factors in nature belong to the language level. The obstacles caused by thesefactors can be resolved by enlarging vocabulary, broadening knowledge scope, andstrengthening the awareness of cross-culture communication, etc; the last factorbelongs to the semantic level. The difficulties caused by the semantic factor remain a tough issue. Through a theoretical analysis, the author holds that it is the plenty ofnominalization and transitivity which contribute to the semantic factor.Nominalization and transitivity are the main signs of grammatical metaphor.As for the relationship between metaphor and language, Halliday (2000)advocates that if something is said to be metaphorical, it must be metaphorical byreference to something else. That is, for a given semantic configuration there will besome realization in the lexiogrammar---some wording---that can be consideredcongruent; there may also be various others that are in some respect ‘transferred’, ormetaphorical. To understand grammatical metaphor is to probably transfermetaphorical form into congruent form. With this assumption, the study takes theframework of grammatical metaphor interpretation by Halliday as the theoreticalfoundation, upon which a Three-Selection Model, as a trial, is put forward as a kind ofteaching model. It is expected that the Three-Selection Model can be effective inhelping students remove reading obstacles caused by semantic factors and finallygrasp the real meaning of reading texts. This is exactly the innovation of the study.This method proposed involves three steps: selection of process, selection ofconfiguration of transitivity functions, and selection of group-phrase classes for therealization of configuration of transitivity functions. The function of the proposedmodel is expected to transfer the unintelligible metaphorical form into an accessiblecongruent form, which will help students cast off the restriction of grammaticalmetaphor and facilitate them understanding the reading text.The author proves the efficiency of the Three-Selection Model by an empiricalstudy. The study is carried out in the College of Electromechanical Engineering ofQingdao University of Science and Technology. What’s more, all of the subjects arespecialist students of2011. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods areintegrated to support the study. It turns out that the Three-Selection Model adopted inclass can help students understand the expressions of grammatical metaphor,appropriately grasp the real meaning of texts, and improve their reading ability.Meanwhile, in view of the instructive value of the study, it is expected that somepositive pedagogical implications can be shed on reading teaching. |
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