A Study On English Reading Teaching For Vocational Students From The Perspective Of Frame Semantics

Reading, as one of the four basic skills of language learning, is of greatimportance in EFL/ESL learning. Teaching and learning English reading is currentlythe focus of much concern. Most students have mastered the essential vocabularyand grammar rules, but it is quite difficult for them to improve their reading abilityin an efficient way; for the vocational school students, the situation is even worse.The vocational school students often lack various background information, such asgeography, history, science, knowledge of culture and so on. Therefore, how toenhance students’ reading comprehension has been an urgent task for the Englishteachers.The theories and practice of reading have seen dramatic improvements becauseof our growing understanding and accepting development in linguistics,psycholinguistics, psychology and language teaching. Different linguists havedifferent opinions on the definition of reading. Reading was first assumed as a ratherpassive, bottom-up decoding process. Later, that reading is not a passive decodingprocess, but an active psycholinguistic guessing game and an "interactive" processhas been recognized by Goodman, Rumelhart and many other researchers. No matterwhether the process is "top-down","bottom-up" or "the interactive process", readerscan’t arrive at efficient comprehension without their frame knowledge.This thesis is to explore the effect of applying the frame semantics to readingteaching in vocational schools. Frame semantics can be used before reading, duringthe process of reading and after reading. And the author attempts to adopt thethree-step reading teaching model in vocational school English reading classes. Inorder to find out whether the teaching model of frame semantics can be appliedeffectively to English reading teaching in vocational schools, the author makesquestionnaires on problems of teachers’ instruction and students’ reading, especially the reading skills and background knowledge before and after the experiment. Theresult of the pre-experiment questionnaire reveals that most of the students lack priorknowledge desired for reading comprehension and most teachers don’t pay enoughattention to background knowledge in reading teaching. The results of thepost-experiment questionnaire present that the students in the experimental classreap the benefit from the frame-oriented teaching model and improve their readingability. Finally, the author also highlights the significance of frame semantics appliedto English reading teaching in vocational schools, put forward some implications andsuggestions on reading teaching based on frame semantics and points out somelimitations of the experiment for further research in this aspect.This study attempts to answer the following two questions:1. Will the frame-oriented method develop the vocational school students’reading strategies and enable them to form good reading habits?2. Will the frame-oriented method facilitate the vocational school students’reading comprehension?To find out the answers of the above two research questions, the author choosestwo classes from the Vocational School of Jiangmen Radio and TV University.Two classes, each consisting of50students, are with the similar level of Englishproficiency. The experiment was carried out from March,2011to June,2011.After careful analysis of the data collected from the pre-test and post-test, thefindings come out as the below:1. Adopting frame-oriented method can develop the vocational school students’reading strategies and help them form good reading habits2. The application of frame semantics to English reading teaching does improvethe vocational school students’ reading comprehension.