近年来，对应试教育的过分关注使教师们忽略了学生学习英语的真正兴趣。众所周知，英语阅读是学习英语的一大难点，特别是对初中生而言，因为他们处于初级阶段，因此激发他们的阅读兴趣当是重中之重。
本文以第二语言习得研究的理论以及动机理论为基础，探讨了初中生英语阅读兴趣与能力之间的关系并从中得到启示，将此启示运用至教学实践中以提高学生的阅读能力。此外，本文还分析了英语阅读教学方法、阅读材料等影响学生英语阅读兴趣的因素，揭示了合适的教学方法能激发学习者在英语阅读中的积极兴趣, 获得最佳阅读效果。
In recent years, the over focus on examination-oriented education has caused ignorance on students’ real interest in learning English. As we all know, reading is one of the difficulties in English learning，especially for junior school students，because they are on the elementary stage of learning a foreign language, stimulating their interest in reading is of extreme significance.
This thesis is based on the studies of second language acquisition and many motivation theories at home and abroad. It explores the relationship between junior school students’ reading interest and competence. Although both examination-oriented education and interest are on the basis of promoting motivation, some researches prove that intrinsic motivation (interest) is more beneficial than extrinsic one. The papers’ ultimate aim is to get enlightenment from the relationship and put the implication into practice making it useful in teaching reading. In addition, this thesis analyses the several aspects of reading interest, such as reading materials, teaching methods and so on. The results reveal that proper teaching materials and methods in reading teaching class can effectively stimulate students’ interest in English reading, and that students’ reading competence can be improved by activating their interest.
After the implementation of reform and opening up, there was an intimate connection between China and western English speaking countries. To better adapt to the economic and social development, an increasing number of Chinese began to learn English. That’s why since the early 1980s English has been nationwide taught as a foreign language (FL) in China. With a desire to master English as a foreign language, one must first learn its basic four skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, reading is by far the most important of the four skills in a second language, particularly in English as a second or foreign language (Carrell, 121). So reading in a second language has received a great amount of attention from researchers over the past decades, and improving students’ reading competence is a pressing matter of the moment, as junior school students are on the fundamental stage of learning English.
Furthermore, according to the National English Curriculum released in 2011, it says that the aim of the language skills including reading is subject to “what students can do” in certain grades, which helps activate students’ enthusiasm, improve students’ ability to apply language and evaluate students’ learning outcome scientifically and reasonably. However, as far as the present situation of reading teaching, what the National English Curriculum required doesn’t meet the standard at all. What’s worse, due to the exam-oriented education in China, students now remain less interest in English learning. Therefore, activating students’ enthusiasm for reading is just like an arrow on the bowstring.
We all know that motivation plays a central role in second language learning. Belonging to intrinsic motivation, interest is one of the important factors that influences the effects in junior school English reading. Moreover, it has been suggested that students’ interest in learning a foreign language is a vital factor on acquiring one language by some studies. This paper will explore the relationship between interest and reading competence in the light of motivation aiming to apply this relationship to reading teaching in junior school. The paper’s ultimate intention is to motivate students’ interest from effective methods and proper reading material in learning reading, so that students’ reading competence can accordingly be improved.
The teaching plan below is based on Pets from Unit 8, Grade 7. The text includes two poems of pets — dog and goldfish. The topic is intimately related to daily life and can easily arouse students’ interest. Therefore, the material is comparatively typical for researching the methods in reading.
Teaching objectives:
1. To arouse students’ interest in pets.
2. To learn some new words and sentence patterns.
3. Students are able to use the new words to talk about different pets.
4. To get an ability of reading a poem.
5. To learn how to get along with animals and be in harmony with nature.
Teaching procedure:
Step 1 Pre-reading
1.Lead-in: Play the music video “I have a pet”.
Brainstorm: Teachers describe different features and let students guess. If they guess right, teachers should praise them appropriately.
Teachers create a true situation using their own pets to lead in the two poems.
Preview and predict: Ask the students what the text is talking about.
Step 2 While-reading
1.Fast reading: Design some exercise for students to help them understand the text, such as true or false questions and answering questions.
2.Careful reading:
Task 1: Let the students to match the difficult sentences of the poems with their meanings to check whether the students understand the poem “My Dog”.
Task 2: Read the poem about goldfish on page 94 and complete the sentences that describe a goldfish.
Task 3: Complete the sentences below with the words in the box.
Task 4: Work in pairs to discuss the rhymes in the poems, for example, all rhymes with ball. Let them percept the beauty of poems and encourage them to create poems on themselves. (Teachers should praise students who answer the question correctly and quickly.)
Step 3 Post-reading
1.Check out: Make full use of proper exercise to check the level of students’ understanding, including the main idea and detailed information.
2.Discussion: Work in pairs or small groups to talk about their own pets.
Step 4 Homework
Write a poem about their pets using the text as an example.
Conclusion
In China, examination-oriented education gains its prevalence, which leads to the phenomenon that students become less and less interested in English learning, especially in reading. This thesis has presented the relationship between interest and reading competence in EFL reading. On the other hand, the research indicates that teachers play critical roles in creating a relaxing environment for reading so as to arouse students’ reading interest. Meanwhile, teachers’ inspiration in the class is of great help to the cultivation of students’ interest.
This thesis also offers several suggestions on reading teaching to improve the effectiveness of English reading. English teachers should choose flexible teaching methods in reading class. Moreover, instrumental motivation should be combined with interest in English reading teaching. At last, the involvement of students must be taken into consideration, and teachers need to provide more chances for the students.
However, interest is a very complicated human behavior. In order to accomplish a better application of interest-arousing method in teaching of reading, much more work should be done to overcome the limitations. Furthermore, we should keep on working out new techniques to arouse students’ interest in English reading. Last but not least, these factors, including teachers, researchers, textbook designers that do contribute to enhancing reader’s interest, so to speak, merely stressing part of the factors is far from enough to make every student interested in English reading. There is still a long way to go. |
