A Study Of Middle School Students’ English Reading Obstacles

English reading is an important aspect in middle school English learning and teaching.It is also one of the five important English skills,which are listening,speaking,reading,writing and translating.The student’s performance in English reading is directly related to their English learning and the teacher’s teaching effect.Currently,there are some reading obstacles in different levels of middle school students.Doing some researches on middle school students’ English reading obstacles can enhance their English reading ability and the capacity of using English.This paper bases on the current situation of middle school students’ English reading,and combines with foreign scholars’ studies on the reading obstacles.The counter measures tries to get the data of middle school students’ English reading habits,motivations,strategies and the feedbacks of teacher’s teaching by the way of teaching experiment,questionnaire and interview.The researcher intends to study the current reading obstacles of middle school student through analyzing the collected data and puts forward some suggestions to overcome these obstacles.The researcher selects 60 students in Grade nine of Mituosi middle school in Xincai county of Henan province as the research samples.The researcher uses the reading texts in the Project English,Grade Nine,Book 1 as the key teaching materials.The teaching experiment is guided by schema theory.The researcher does some analyses of middle school students’ English reading obstacles and the corresponding causes through the measures of observing their performances in class.The researcher strives to give some suggestions to make practical significance in how to use the schema theory to enhance the teaching effect of English reading effectively.The research result shows that middle school students generally have linguistic and non-linguistic obstacles in English reading.Linguistic obstacles include lack of vocabulary,having difficulty in discriminating similar words,overlooking key words’ meaning and context,etc.Non-linguistic obstacles include the obstacles in reading motivation,reading strategy,self-efficiency and background knowledge,etc.Middle school students always pay a lot of attention to the linguistic obstacles,but they seldom concern the non-linguistic obstacles.And they often focus on teacher’s reading teaching at the knowledge level rather than ability level.In terms of the English teacher,they focus more on the student’s performance rather than the student’s ability.Based on the research result above,this paper propounds some suggestions on how to overcome middle school students’ English reading obstacles and improve the efficiency of English classroom teaching and learning.The teacher should guide students to expand the vocabulary and let them pay attention to the discriminating similar words.The student should increase the accumulation of background knowledge and think according to three models of schema theory under the guidance of the teacher.The teacher should change the traditional teaching model,doing some target teaching on students’ reading obstacles in the usual teaching practice.Achieve the purpose of helping the student overcome reading obstacles and enhancing their reading ability.