A Study On Junior High School English Teachers’ Knowledge About Teaching Reading

As far as comprehensive English language application ability is concerned, it isimportant to cultivate students’ reading comprehension skills.The New CurriculumStandard sets its goal on fostering English language skills, knowledge, emotion andattitude, learning strategies and cultural sense, it promotes task-focused model as amethod to improve students’ reading comprehension ability. English reading abilityplays an important role on students’ overall ability to utilize English. Students benefitfrom reading teaching in terms of logical thinking, memory, learning autonomy, andemotional interaction between students, sense of corporation and achievement andself-confidence resulted from successful learning. Regardless of all the benefits,English reading teaching has been facing some problems, such as big classes,over-loaded assignment, the leading role of assessment based on final exams andteachers’ limited knowledge and so forth. Even though there are so many limitationsfor students’ reading ability fostering, this thesis will focus solely on teachers’knowledge about reading.Based on the data and analysis obtained from the teachers, the thesis reveals thatfirstly, high school English teachers have already equipped with certain knowledgeabout reading, but it is limited, imperfect and needs to be renewed and enhanced, andit’s lucky to see most of them are willing to change and improve through some kindsof ways; secondly, it can be found from the three typical class observation that theseteachers’ knowledge about reading is consistent with their real teaching, obviously,they are likely to apply their intrinsic knowledge and prior theories into teaching.In the light of the survey results, the thesis promotes the followingrecommendations regarding reading teaching improvement and teachers’ professionaldevelopment. First of all, teachers should attend speeches and perform in-classobservation in order to enhance theoretical knowledge and teaching ability. Secondly,learn and put the following reading teaching strategies into practice: selectappropriate reading materials, apply cohesive and coherent theories to analyze thetext, choose bottom-up and up-down reading models or interactive reading models, teach students several reading strategies, focusing on discourse analysis, enlargestudents vocabulary and encourage students to read textbooks and extra-classmaterials. In addition, students are able to improve and develop themselves by expertlectures, class observations and discussions with colleagues and so on.In conclusion, this article explores methods to improve student reading abilityand enhance teacher knowledge and awareness in reading instruction...