An Investigation Of The Status Quo Of English Proofreading Training In Guanzhong Urban High Schools

Proofreading is an integrated test in English teaching and learning for high schoolstudents. It checks various language skills and language grammar knowledge. Thepurpose of proofreading is to help the students to find, judge, and correct some lexical,syntactic and the logic errors in the discourse. At present, the proofreading plays soimportant role in English teaching and learning that it’s still used by many provinces intheir college entrance English examination as one important test. Shaanxi province is oneof them. Recently studies on this part mainly stress on the test itself, including the regularpattern of this test, the features of the test questions and so on. This paper studies statusquo of English proofreading training in Guanzhong urban high schools. It chooses onerepresentative high school---Xijiao High School for the symbolic sampling. Accordingto the sampling survey, we can check the present shortcomings of teaching from teachersand of learning from students in this school. This investigation can be developed mainlyaround the three questions as follows:（1）the present proofreading learning situation ofthe students,（2）the present proofreading teaching situation of the teachers,（3）factorshaving negative influence on the learning of the students. All these results can be adoptedin order to put availability suggestions and data to other schools in this area to improveproofreading situation. By surveys of tests, interviews, questionnaires and classroomobservations with several students and teachers, this study collects and finds somepresent existing disadvantages in English teaching and learning proofreading. Theshortcomings of students can be concluded as follows: lack of confidence, patience andinterest, even afraid of proofreading; practice absence and clerical errors; weak in test features and grammar knowledge in parts of speech inflectional changes, specialknowledge confusion caused by differences between English and Chinese, and specialEnglish grammar structure. As well, for teachers’ results analysis in classroomobservations and interviews in teaching, there exist the following problems: no enoughattention in teaching and ignoring the teaching task specifically for proofreading, lack ofsystematic guidance for proofreading exercises and neglecting the feedback of exercisesafter class. Thus, this paper proposes several targeted suggestions. On one hand, studentsin learning proofreading should first establish confidence and overcome thepsychological barriers towards it. Then practice makes perfect. Second, avoid loss ofmarks because of mistakes. Third, develop good writing habits, and cultivateconsciousness to make the sentence correct. Next, try to summarize the features of thistest, and have a good understanding of English grammar. Last not the least, read widelyand pay attention to discourse analysis. On the other hand, teachers should first have afeasible teaching plan, and make sure the suitable practice. Second, pay more attention tothe infiltration of emotion in teaching, and give serious feedback at homework. Next,cultivate students’ interest in proofreading, and connect the proofreading teaching withwritten expression, reading comprehension, individual choice, spelling and so forth. Atthe same time, the limits of this study would be put in the end. First, this paper is lack ofcomprehensive in the choosing of research site, which ignores the individual specialcases that have different situation with Xijiao High School in Guanzhong urban areas.The second limit is the short duration of study and sample selection. Last but not the least,this study involves questionnaire survey. However, some individuals are not so serious inthe fill, which may affects the final data.