A Study Of Level Teaching On English Reading For Non-english Majors In Higher Vocational College

Reading is the basic means of mastering language knowledge and acquiring information.Meanwhile, reading is the basis of improving the ability of listening, speaking, writing andtranslation (Xie Qiuling,2004). For most Chinese Higher Vocational College students, aftertheir graduation from college, reading and translation are mainly applied in their jobs, becausethey often need to read and translate some relevant materials written in English, such as thescientific materials, English newspapers and magazines, the manual of the imported equipments,etc. However, the reading ability of Higher Vocational College students is worrying and therehave been significant differences in reading abilities among the students of the same classaccording to author’s survey. Adopting the present large-scale classroom teaching mode,teachers set the same reading teaching aim for students of different English reading levels,design the same class activities and reading assignments for them, and adopt the same means ofassessment, which make students with higher reading ability feel reading boring andunchallenging; students with lower reading ability lose their interest and confidence in learningEnglish reading. Thus it results in the inefficiency of English reading teaching.In order to improve the students’ English reading proficiency and enhance their learninginterest, the author applied Level Teaching model in Higher Vocational English reading. Twonatural classes were selected as participants in this study and one-term experimental study wascarried out. The author divided students of the experimental class into high level, middle leveland low level (i.e. level A, B and C) according to their reading scores in the pre-test and thendesigned different teaching goals, reading tasks in class, reading assignments, and means ofassessment respectively. Then, a comparison was made between the experimental class and thecontrol class about the reading scores before and after the experiment. Finally, the authorconducted a survey into students’ learning motivation, learning interest and their feedback onLevel Teaching technique. The study showed that Level Teaching on English reading caneffectively improve students’ English reading achievements, and increase their learningmotivation and learning interest; most students held positive attitudes towards this LevelTeaching experiment. Therefore, it was concluded as a suitable method for English reading classroom teaching in our college, providing theoretical and practical reference for HigherVocational English reading teaching. But still some problems or limitations existed during theimplementation of Level Teaching on English reading, because it lasted only one term. Forexample, some students didn’t approve of the grouping where they were only divided accordingto their achievements in one or two tests and Level Teaching had some negative influence onthe affection of Level C students. It suggested us that the teacher should always rearrange oradjust their levels depending on their performance at different times and the teacher should paymore attention to students’ affective needs, especially those of the low-level students. Furtherefforts need to be done on the future experimental instruction to explore more effective ways ofLevel Teaching.