英语泛读教材分析(2)

（A）Text.

In this part students are given a passage about 1200-2000 words. In most cases, it is an excerpt from a native writer and the theme of the text touches on various aspects, like society, culture, literature, science and technology to name just a few. By all means, it is a hard nut to crack. For teachers, this text is even more difficult and complicated than an intensive reading text, and they do not know how to convey successfully the knowledge to students. For students, they have to look every new word up in dictionary to get a basic understanding for guessing word from context is not useful at all, because there are too many new words for a just enrolled student so many so that the words surrounding the unknown ones are unknown, too. So, I can say this text is not suitable to be conducted in class for first-first year students as extensive reading material. Then what is extensive reading? And what an extensive reading material should be? According to Davis (1995:329) (Cited from Renandya. 2007):

An extensive reading programme is a supplementary class library scheme, attached to an English course, in which pupils are given the time, encouragement, and materials to read pleasurably, at their own level, as many books as they can, without the pressures of testing or marks. Thus, pupils are competing only against themselves, and it is up to the teacher to provide the motivation and monitoring to ensure that the maximum number of books is being read in the time available. The watchwords are quantity and variety, rather than quality, so that books are selected for their attractiveness and relevance to the pupils’ lives, rather than for literary merit.

Similarly, ‘Wilhelm (2001) argues that text difficulty should be within students’ zone of proximal development; that is, they can read the text with assistance. But if the texts are within students’ zone of actual development or beyond their ZPD, readers may not read efficiently and critically since the former belongs to an independent reading level that is not challenging and thought provoking for readers and the latter is at students’ frustration reading level.’ (Cited from Reza Zabihi. 2011)

From the above we can see the text in this part of Extensive Reading goes to far for first-year students to engage in real extensive activities. Extensive reading should be a method to put students in a native-like environment, to let students dip into multiple language exposures. During extensive reading, students should read at their own space with the aim to develop a sense of language instead of focusing on new words, difficult sentence structures and grammar. Then what should an extensive reading text be? Using Krashen’s input theory, I can infer that while intensive reading adopts ‘i+1’ mode, then in extensive ‘students should be reading text at an i+1, i, or i-1 level, with i being their current proficiency level, and 1 referring to language features that are slightly above students’ competence.’ (Renandya. 2007). So, first, students’ current English proficiency should be taken into consideration. Students of first year of college, they just graduated from high school, and the English education they received is primarily on elementary one. They know less about academic reading, professional words. Sudden encountering with many big words will dismay them. The best way I think to alter this part is to use graded reading materials. The grading can be done according to TEM-4 (Test for English Majors Band 4). This is a Chinese national English proficiency test held in the second year of English majors. As mentioned above, this series of Extensive Reading textbooks are designed for the first and second year students. So we may just grade the texts of book 1 of TEM-1, book 2 of TEM-2, book 3 of TEM-3 and book 4 of TEM-4. By doing so, students can first easily adapt themselves to college level English study, and second prepare them for their professional examination. And most importantly they can have much easier comprehensible access towards extensive reading.

（B） Reading Skills.

This part provides various reading skills for students like previewing, guessing words form context, skimming and scanning and so on. There is no denying that reading skills are important. But as a book for English majors, only focusing on skills can not contribute much for students to improve their reading ability. Still, this way of teaching reading skills are not fruitful. To complete this part in order to help students develop themselves into competent readers, I think, it is a must to add reading strategies and cultivation metacognition awareness.

Let us first look at the definitions of skill, strategy and metacognition: skills tend to be simpler, smaller, more specific, more discrete; strategies tend to be larger, more complex, multi-step and involve the use of a number of skills; metacognition consists of knowledge of cognition and regulation and control of cognitive acts. Metacognitive knowledge (Flavel, 1982) consists of persons (interest, skills, knowledge), tasks (understanding nature and demand of task) and strategies (knowing the strategies for monitoring, repairing, and regulating reading process); metacognitive control (Flavel, 1982) consists of planning (setting purpose, selecting particular actions), monitoring (regulating and redirecting reading efforts to achieve goals) and evaluating (appraising effectiveness of strategies used). So, we can have a hierarchical relationship among skill, strategy and metacognition: metacognition can help students understand and acquire reading strategies which leads to a better use of skills. Therefore, the weakness of this part is obvious: only teaching students reading skills will not sufficiently enable them to use them correctly and effectively. …… 此处隐藏：3826字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……