英语泛读教材分析(3)

Then how do we make it a better part of this extensive reading textbook? My suggestion is that we could teach students useful reading strategies which consist of many different reading skills instead of reading skills only, at the same time, pay great attention to raise students’ metacognitive awareness. For example, we can in this part first introduce a global reading strategy like predicating, and then tell students the correct skills to be used like guessing new word’s meaning from context, inferring relative information from background knowledge etc. In this way, students will acquire not only learn and acquire the skills but also strategies, and gradually form a sense of how these learned strategies should be used in different situation, in other words, have a metacognition knowledge of strategies using.

（C） Testing.

In this part, students are given 3 short passages to read. Each passage is varies from 100-300 words. The aim of this testing is to examine the speed of student’ reading and how much students can understand the passages. Compared with the text of the first part of this textbook, the passages are easy-understanding ones because there are not many new words, difficult sentence structures and grammar. In my teaching experience, I often ask students to do this part in class. Most students can finish reading the passages around no more than 15 minutes and get most correct answers to the following multiple-choice questions. This is a really simple test, but for what? Recording the reading time of each passage of course is not the answer. It may be useful to have an overview of the time used in this part after the semester to see whether students will improve in reading speed or not. Its appearance seems abrupt and irrelevant with the other parts of a unit. The whole organization of a unit is discrete. One plausible explanation is possibly that it is a preparation for students for their TEM-4 examination. Because, in TEM-4, there is a similar part called ‘fast reading’ which requires students to read fast and get the most comprehension. This test-wise design, in my opinion, is not compatible with the nature of extensive reading. Because one point that extensive reading stresses is to let students read without pressure. My altering suggestion is to change this part into one with background knowledge connected to the main text of the first part. It could be an anecdote, a joke, a cross talk or anything that is interesting and pertaining to the text. In this way, students can not only read for fun, but also have a deeper understanding of the text, and this cultural accumulation is very helpful for their English acquisition.

（D） Homereading

The text in this part, according to the author, is related with the first part text. Under most circumstances, this part is often the continuing part of the first part. That means, students is given two long difficult texts to read. As I have stated above, students get not only a few problems in reading and comprehending the first part, it is just another boring text which they are so reluctant to do it. As often as not, I ask students to read it after class and check the answers in next class. Even so, students rarely tried to do it. They just noted down the answers.

By homereading, we mean it is kind of reading activity you can enjoy on a lovely day, or over a cup of coffee. In fact, students have to flip pages of a dictionary to get new words’ meaning, to look back at the first text to better his comprehension. It is more torture than enjoyment. Although, it is a good idea to stretch reading from only class to students’ life, it is hard to be put in practice. My idea of changing this part is either simply omit it or make it a practical one. If we do the latter, I think we can do it in two ways. First, we can change this part into a comparatively simple one. The text can be the ones closely related to students’ life or the ones they are interested in. There would be no questions. Students are only required to give a sharing presentation on what they have thought about the text, or what they have found interesting of the text, things like that. By doing this, students are not pressed anymore with the questions, they just read for sharing, as long as they indeed read, the aim is accomplished. Secondly, we can assign students no specific reading text for their homereading. We can ask them to read anything that is available at hand, and report what they read to the class. Nowadays, students are immersed into a digital era with abundant information. Anything they read from their computers, laptops, and smartphones can be considered as a homereading exercise. Similarly, there should be no questions, and possibly a sharing presentation. In this way students can read freely, widely and passionately. It is of great help for students to learn background information, up-to-date words and steep into various English reading environments, and that is what I think a homereading should be.

（E） Exercises.

Exercises are an essential part of an extensive reading textbook. They are effective ways of examining what students have understood the text of the textbook. Exercises are also a direct indicator how those ‘input’ get across to students. …… 此处隐藏：3268字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……