On The Effects Of Priming In Reading Comprehension

Reading Comprehension plays an important role in English language learning.Both students and teachers have realized that without the ability to get well-informed,it is impossible for students to use the English language as a communication tool.Reading is a significant and efficient way for students to gain information, to broaden their horizons, to stimulate learning interests, during which process students practice and develop their ability of analyzing, thinking and judgment. However, some students spend a lot time and effort reading to prepare for exams but they can’t make any progress any way. It turns out that there exist some problems in reading teaching.Teaching methods used in some reading classes are mechanical and inflexible. Many teachers focus on knowledge and text interpretation. Reading is usually done in a process of learning vocabulary, listing and analyzing sentence structures and grammar sentence by sentence. It proves inefficient.The author of this thesis tries to take cognitive approach to improve teaching of reading. In the thesis, the priming effect is introduced and the effects of priming in reading comprehension are studied. The author of this thesis chose two classes of Grade Eight students from Xuhui Junior High school in her experiments. One class(Class One) was selected as the experiment class while the other one(Class three) was the control class. The experiments class was given some priming materials before doing reading comprehension while the control class was simply asked to do the exercise. The experiment lasted one month and four experiments were conducted by the author. The data of the experiments were collected and analyzed.The findings of the experiment showed that if the teacher can provide students with positive priming before exercises, it will make it easier for them to process information and understand the reading materials better. Thus, the appropriate priming can increase students’ interest and arouse their consciousness in reading. Priming can help students to comprehend reading texts as an organic whole and improve their learning ability and strategic ability.