浅谈通过练习提高学生阅读能力

新疆哈密市第四中学 丁 辉

Practice plays a very important role in language learning. “People are motivated to learn language in order to be able to communicate” . How can we communicate freely and naturally? There is an old saying“Practice makes perfect.”Practice is a regularly repeated exercise done in order to improve one's skill.

In English language teaching classes in China, teachers often make full use of every minute in class to “teach” their students, explaining word-byword and analyzing sentence by sentence. The students are supposed to be busy taking notes while listening to their teacher attentively. Their teacher has to tell them everything before they get a chance to think about what they are studying. Students seldom have time to practice using the English language. As a result, the teaching process is prolonged and both teachers and students feel tired or bored.

According to the SETS teachers should aim to help students to develop their skills in listening, reading, speaking and writing. So in a general class, it is the teacher's responsibility to see that all the skills are practiced. “For many students, reading is by far the most important of the four skills in a second language,particularly in English as a second or foreign language.”

This paper will argue that the best way to help EFL students develop their reading skills is through practice. And it will present the most important thing:students can form a good reading habit and know how to read effectively and correctly through practice, which would benefit students a lot in their future work. It will be presented in four sections: 1) Why is practice so important? 2) How to improve students' reading skills through effective use of practice? 3)What problems exist in reading through practice? 4) How to solve these problems?

There exist some problems in the traditional approach to English reading in China. Some of the students who have learned English for several years can’t understand the easy English text or article well. Even they are afraid of reading. They only know the text in our textbooks.Lack of practice is the key cause.Good and successful practice will make learners more confident than before. Practice has many functions for learners and teachers. It benefits them all.

The traditional approach to English reading in China is generally product-based.”.Giving feedback has been a thorny issue since the EFL(English as a foreign language)students start to learn reading.“Students are chiefly engaged in display reading rather than real reading.” They read to be judged or evaluated rather than to communicate ideas.

Practice encourages students to imagine and think. There are many types of practice. It can encourage students to use their own mind to do different forms of practice. Classroom teaching has been considered as an important link (the students). The traditional Chinese classroom's dependence on the teacher as a resource runs counter to the Second Language Teaching (SLT).”For example, when we need to learn some grammar structure in reading, teachers usually just explain the form of the structure.There are many disadvantages in this form. If teachers use practice, such as free exercise or discussing in the groups,students will try their best to use their own way to grasp them.Goodman (1971) indicates that reading is not a passive process,but an active one , in fact it is an interactive process. We should encourage students to read positively instead of the teacher explaining everything. Practice gives students a room to create,to imagine and to think. When the students are able to imagine alternatives and new combinations and connections, they will have a good way to learn.

Practice plays the import roles for both learners and teachers. It makes the learners like English and know how to learn English. It helps teachers to understand students’condition clearer which can improve the teaching quality.

For learners:

a.Practice arouses the learners’interest in learning and encourages students to learn actively.

As we know, interest will form desire and the desire will shape motivation. “An interest in a language is well known as a key to being motivated to learn.Practice is necessary to keep the class enjoyable and create a sense of fun” .We all know that people do not learn if they are confused or bored. The different types of practice give learners different feelings about the language. A successful practice makes students interested in English.

In class, when students'interest is aroused, they will become motivated. They don't learn just sitting in classes, listening to teachers, Out of class , students can read the reading materials fluently through practice. Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately and quickly. When fluent readers read silently, they recognize words automatically. They group words quickly to help them gain meaning from what they read. They read aloud effortlessly and with expression.“Fluency is important because it provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension.Because fluent readers do not have to concentrate on decoding the words,they can focus their attention on what the text means.”

“Students are reluctant to speak because they are afraid of making mistakes and failing to find suitable words to express themselves well. If the teacher tries to encourage them to speak by using as many ways as possible and creating a good language speaking environment, students will speak actively, willingly and naturally.”The students will actively participate in the different kinds of practice. Practice gives students chances to relate to past experiences, knowledge and anything in their daily lives, so learning becomes easier.

b. Practice creates the opportunities to use the language.

“It is believed that the best way of learning a foreign language is to study it in the target language community. There,the language environment plays an important role.” As we know some people can learn a language without studying it, for instance, a baby.If his or her parents use Chinese in daily life and he or she lives in a Chinese surrounding, it is inconceivable that he or she could learn to speak English.

For the EFL students in a purely Chinese environment, they do not have an easy opportunity to learn the English language.Thus, the teacher should try to provide for the students various reading materials in order to enrich their language experience through reading. Therefore,practice can create this atmosphere to use the language because it requires students to use English. They need the opportunity to show their talent to communicate. It is a common problem--some students found that after finishing reading certain passages, they could not remember some important details, so they were puzzled when they answered questions readers can easily be bewildered by a long string of events. The strategy of practice helps the reader to solve these problems. Everyone's brain cannot remember all the things that have been learnt, so reinforcing knowledge becomes necessary. If students just repeat to remember,it is tedious, but if they do some exercises about reading by themselves, will become more interesting. A great number of various practices give students the chance to use knowledge,which they have already studied.

For teachers:

a.Practice is a process of feedback.

How can teachers test students'ability to absorb knowledge in the class? Practice is an interactive process. Teachers can get different responses from students through practice. “Without feedback neither learner nor teacher can improve because they will not know what they need to know or what extent they are fulfilling their goals.” For teachers, it is the best way to know how much knowledge the students have grasped and what level the students have reached. It's also a good chance to find out the problems,which exist among the students.For students, they need frequent opportunities to perform and receive suggestions for improvement. They also need chances to reflect on what they have learned and what they still need to know.

b.Teachers could find out the individual differences among students through practice.

Each person is very different from each other. Some students are brilliant, some are bad, some are good at theory and some are keen on hands -on experience. So for teachers, it's very important to teach students using different ways. Students have different aptitudes to create. For example,one is not good at English, if you use the very complex way to teach him or her all the time ,and maybe it will make him or her frustrate. Do you think he or she can learn English very well?Individual differences decide the students' different abilities to acquire knowledge. If teachers want to improve their teaching,it's good to use different methods to teach different English learners. For instance,discussions can improve students'listening and oral skills, while debates can make student's minds thoughtful and logical and also promote the students' reactions and expressions.

Discussion is one of the best ways to help students develop the background they are lacking.However, it needs to be pointed out that a discussion shouldn't simply be the teacher telling students a lot of information, but should be an interactive procedure by which the teacher and students talk about a given topic. Another point that needs to be made clear is that in the discussion the teacher should ask questions that require students to respond with more than yes or no, and encourage students to raise their own questions about the topic or to raise questions about the answers of the students. Only in this way can the discussion achieve the desired result.

Pictures are concrete ways to develop background knowledge even when students have very little or no background knowledge on the topic to be covered in the reading. The pictures in a text can be used as a basis for discussion about the topic of the text. Additional pictures can also be used to illustrate important concepts in the text. However,the use of pictures should be combined with discussion to ensure that students are developing the background knowledge that relates to understanding the whole text rather than simply focusing on the topic of the text.

Practice plays a very important role for EFL students in reading. From the above analysis of the importance of practice in the EFL context of China, it is essential for the students to lay a good language foundation through practice. This article introduces some effective ways of helping EFL students learn to read through practice. Lack of background knowledge is frequently the major cause of many Chinese EFL students'poor reading comprehension, and is also the most neglected factor in EFL reading in China. It has been shown in this essay that two reasons cause students to be short of background knowledge. There are a number of ways to help students develop background knowledge, such as discussion, pictures, concrete materials, role-playing, and prior reading. However, it is also important to guide them in learning positively and reading actively to fulfill their ultimate goal of learning to read and growing into effective and independent readers.