Research On Teaching Chinese Intermediate Reading And Comprehension

Reading and comprehension is very important in teaching foreign languages. It serves an important role in increasing the students' vocabulary and understanding of the given language's grammatical structures. Moreover,it is also critical at improving the students' critical thinking and problem solving skills in a foreign language. Therefore,efficient teaching of reading and comprehension has an overall effect of improving students'foreign language skills.Reliance on reading and comprehension as a tool for language acquisition is even more emphasized in an environment where there is less interaction with first language speakers of the target language. This is even more applicable in Kenya's Chinese language teaching.With Kenya and China being thousands of miles away from each other,Chinese learners in Kenya face the huddle of having fewer opportunities to interact with Chinese citizens. As such in class sessions are very important to improve students' Chinese language skills.Consequently,it is important to ensure that reading and comprehension is efficient enough to achieve the desired results. This paper therefore undertook to research on intermediate students in the Confucius Institute, University of Nairobi. Through an explanation of the theoretical framework that supports efficient reading and comprehension,this paper established the tenets necessary for efficient reading and comprehension. This tenets include; effective reading and comprehension strategies and effective evaluation student outcome evaluation methods. This paper then undertook to .investigate on the state of the adherence to the reliable tenets of comprehension.A questionnaire was then formulated to establish the students' comprehension strategies used by the students. The research revealed that the students had good preparation and organization skills. However, the research found out that there was room for improvement in the elaboration skills which are important at decoding the message in a text.To address this, this paper through thorough literature review proposed the use of Self-explanation Reading Training (SERT). The method was preferred due to its overt method to improve students reading strategies. As such the students would consciously engage various reading strategies with the expectation to understand the text better.Moreover, comprehension practice questions were also proposed as a way of supplementing the SERT model.