Chapter One Introduction
1.1Research Background and Purposes
Reading, which is one of the four important language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), plays the predominant role in the EFL teaching and learning in China. The importance of it has already been widely accepted for it is the main means to acquire knowledge and the main channel to absorb written information. Most of the newspapers, magazines as well as literatures are published and read in English. What’s more, 90 percent of the websites are written in English and most of the software is programmed in English. Therefore, for millions of Chinese English learners, reading is a basic skill and main channel of information input. In addition, English is a compulsory subject in China and reading comprehension has a large proportion in all kinds of English tests, which means reading competence directly influences students’ academic achievement. New English Curriculum also emphasizes the importance of reading, in which, the descriptions of objectives in reading for junior high graduates are as follows: a. The ability to infer the meaning of new words from the context and word formation rules, b. The ability to understand the logical relationships between each sentence in a paragraph, c. The ability to pick out the main ideas in texts and understand the plot in stories, predicting its development and possible endings, d. The ability to understand reading material of different common genres/text types, e. The ability to use appropriate reading strategies to find information according to different reading purposes, f. The ability to use dictionaries and other reference material to carry out learning.
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1.2Significance of the Study
Reading competence determined students’ academic achievement. Unfortunately, it is a common phenomenon of “high input, low output” in reading teaching. Usually, students have so many problems while reading as follows: a. reading word by word, phrase by phrase, or line by line, usually at a very slow speed, b. reading silently with moving the speech organs or reading with sound, c. not enough vocabulary resulting in meeting new words as obstacles in reading, d. consulting of new words in the dictionary while reading too much causing the lack of ability to guess the meaning of some new words by context or word-formatting, e. silent reading with fingers pointing to the words being read, f. constant regression slows down the reading speed, g. the lack of the ability to skim or scan, h. unfamiliarity with a diversity of topics, i. &nb，英语毕业论文，英语毕业论文 |
