英语教学法教程

英语教学法教程 How Do We Read? This section attempts to clarify and illustrate some aspects of the nature of reading. If the students fail to understand the nature of reading, they will adopt inappropriate and ineffective reading strategies; if teachers fail to do so, they will be unable to help the students to develop effective reading skills. Read the following assumptions about reading and decide if you agree with them or not. Try to give reasons for your decisions. When you are ready, discuss your ideas in groups. 1. Reading has only one purpose, i.e. to get information. 2. Reading is a silent activity. Reading aloud does not help understanding. 3. Reading with a purpose will be most effective. 4. When we read, our eyes are constantly moving from letter to letter, word to word. 5. Reading is an individual activity. 6. We need to read and understand all the words in order to understand a text. 7. We read everything at the same speed. 8. When reading in a foreign language, we mentally translate everything in order to understand. 9. It is helpful to use a dictionary to find the meaning of all new words. 10. The lack of cultural knowledge may affect the rate of reading comprehension. Responses to the assumptions above will certain vary from person to person. Some assumptions are obviously untrue such as the first one “Reading has only one purpose, i.e. to get information.” The purpose of having such assumptions in the list is to increase our awareness of different purposes that reading fulfils in real life. Some assumptions may be true in one context, but untrue in another. For example, some people may say “Reading aloud does not help understanding” is untrue because much of our first language literacy is acquired through reading aloud. Either we read aloud by ourselves or our parents read to us. So, the authors would like the reader to locate the situation in the context of learning English as foreign language in China when deciding if the above assumptions are true or untrue. For the authors’ responses, please refer to the back of the book. Reading aloud and silent reading are two types of reading practice commonly found in classrooms. Are they the same or different? Many teachers use the activity of reading aloud in teaching reading in the classroom without understanding what it is for. Reading aloud and silent reading are different in many aspects. Obviously, reading aloud cannot replace silent reading as it involves only the skills of pronunciation and intonation, while one’s real reading ability requires the reading skills of skimming, scanning, predicting, etc. With these differences in mind, teachers should know when to practise reading aloud and when to practise silent reading. Based on our understanding of the nature of reading, we believe effective readers do the following: , They have a clear purpose in reading; , They read silently; , They read phrase by phrase, rather than word by word; , They concentrate on the important bits, skim the rest, and skip the insignificant parts; , They use different speeds and strategies for different reading tasks; , They perceive the information in the target language rather than mentally translate; , They guess the meaning of new words from the context, or ignore them; , They have and use background information to help understand the text. (王蔷. 2000. 英语教学法教程. 北京: 高等教育出版社.)