Influence Of English Reading Environment On Pupils’ English Reading Ability In Primary Schools

A lot of people in our country have been making a great effort to learn English. Many children start to learn English at a very early age. However, the outcome is not satisfactory. One of the main reasons is the lacking of a learning environment. As Williams & Burden (2003) mentions, learning is the result of social interactions. It always occurs within a particular context which is called an environment. Whether a person masters English or not can be judged by his English proficiency. It includes the abilities of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among the English proficiency, reading ability is of great importance because reading plays a very important role in learners’ acquisition of information, study and entertainment and about 95% of our new knowledge is learned by reading(Yin,2007).Nowadays there are so many children learning English. And the pupils’English reading ability is very important. At the same time, it needs environment in English reading. But there haven’t been many researches on this topic so far. What is more, the author’s school has taken part in the provincial reading research on the topic of Reading and Growing since September,2008. Considering all these factors, the author decides to make some efforts in exploring the influence of English reading environment in primary schools. We investigate the fifth and sixth graders’ English reading status in our school by test, interview and questionnaire. By analyzing the data, we realize the status is far from being satisfactory. They lack a natural and sufficient reading environment. Whether in school reading environment or out-of-school reading environment, they lack enough support and guidance on English reading..Without this, pupils’ reading motivations and interests are very low. Their reading habits are hard to be formed or their reading skills are difficult to be trained. These are the factors blocking up the promotion of pupils’ reading ability. In order to help pupils develop their reading abilities, we must try to improve reading environment. In other words, we must try to improve pupils’ reading interests, reading habits and reading skills by improving reading environment. So the first we should do is to improve pupils’ reading environment. We try to improve the school reading environment from four aspects:physical environment, text environment, reading activities and teachers’ guidance. As for the out-of-school reading environment, we divide it into two parts:family reading environment and social reading environment. In the aspect of reading at home, we advice pupils’ parents to improve their family physical reading environment, text environment and their attitude on parent-child reading. In the aspect of social reading, we try to give some suggestions to the residents in our surrounding communities on choosing suitable reading materials for their children by charity English book selling, at the same time, we try to encourage more children to borrow English books from our auto-libraries.All the efforts above are for the purpose of creating a natural reading environment. The next we should do is to compare the tested pupils’ English results, particularly their marks in reading comprehension with untested pupils and make a summary and conclusion.At last, the author of this thesis points out the limitations of the research. At the same time, she suggests that the ways to improve English reading environment mentioned above can be applied in English reading teaching so as to improve pupils’ reading ability.