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Abstract: According to the New English Curriculum Criteria for junior school, apart from intensive reading, extensive reading is much more important, because students can input more background knowledge; strengthen their language feelings; consolidate and enlarge their English vocabulary only through the training of extensive reading. This article talks about the ways to improve students’ English extensive reading ability. On the one hand, efficient extensive reading requires essential skills, but reading skills cannot be improved unless they are taught and trained. On the other hand, students need teachers’ guidance in extensive reading activities. That is, the role of teachers is important. So in order to improve students’ extensive reading ability, teachers should start from teaching students reading skills and accomplish some other important tasks in English reading teaching.
Key words: English extensive reading teaching; skills; tasks
Introduction
One of the obvious characteristics of the New English Curriculum Criteria for junior school stresses that English vocabulary should be enlarged and reading ability should be improved. Reading and enlarging vocabulary are interrelated. English vocabulary can naturally be enlarged in extensive reading. Nowadays in English examinations, reading comprehension covers about forty percent. So reading plays a very important role in students’ English study.
Reading includes intensive reading and extensive reading. Intensive reading teaching is to teach students basic language knowledge and integrated ability to read. It stresses the improvement of students’ accuracy to the English language. However, extensive reading teaching has its own significance: a) Through extensive reading teaching, students can further consolidate and enlarge their vocabulary; b) Students can input more language information and widen their range of knowledge; c) Students can practice their skills widely by reading different writings; d)Students’ reading comprehension can be improved, such as they will be more skilful to cope with long and complicated sentences, to distinguish the main idea from supporting details, to recognize the author’s point of views, etc; e) Understanding the English-speaking countries’ culture and society better; f) Their interest of learning English can be further strengthened. From above, we can see the importance of extensive reading teaching, so teachers must expand intensive reading teaching in class into extensive reading teaching outside of class and compensate for the shortage of intensive reading teaching, so as to improve students’ extracurricular reading ability.
The ability to read extensively and efficiently will have to be taught so that students of learning English will come in contact largely and solely with different writings outside of class. According to my practice and experience in teaching students’ extensive reading in English, I think that teachers should teach students extensive reading skills, four skills are most needed for middle school students in their reading activities and should be trained to improve students’ extensive reading ability. Besides this, teachers should also accomplish four important tasks to ensure students’ extensive reading to carry on effectively.
I. Four extensive reading skills
1.1 Predicting
Teachers can ask students to think about some questions about the text before reading—namely, predicting. When students predict something, their thinking is developing. If predicting is used correctly in English reading, it can do a great deal to students’ reading comprehension. It is an important extensive reading skill.
Students’ predictions, no matter right or wrong, will get their mind closer to the theme of the text to be read. Then the real reading will either confirm or reject the predictions. The reading results will be better than the situation where students start reading with a blank mind. So teachers must teach students how to make predictions before reading a text.
Predictions can be done in three ways.
a) Predicting based on the titles. Good titles always contain the most important information of a written text. Predictions based on studying the title seldom go far wrong. Teachers should ask students to observe the title of a text carefully and tell them to give out their predictions such as the content, the style, and the theme of the text and so on. These predictions focus students’ reading by limiting the range of things to look out for, and read more efficiently.
b) Predicting based on vocabulary. Having made the predictions based on the title, students can be asked to predict some lexical items that they think are likely to occur in the text or the teacher gives them some key words to predict. Then students read the text fast to confirm their predictions. These important lexical items linked together can show the main idea of a text, and students may find the text so predictable that they hardly need to read it all and know what the writer will talk about.
c) Predicting based on the T/F questions. Before students reading a text, the teacher can give them some true or false statements. Students glance at these statements and predict if they are true or false. When students go through the text they will know if they have made the right predictions and then students will make sense of the text and finish other reading purposes better and faster.
1.2 Skimming
Skimming means reading quickly to get the gist, i.e. the main idea of the text. The purpose of skimming is to get the general meaning of something students are reading for pleasure or to get an overview of material that students are reading for the first time. Skimming is also appropriate for reviewing material that students have read previously. So there are generally three skimming methods—preview, overview and review.
Middle school students should be encouraged to try to use this skill in their reading activities. The reading rate for skimming may be twice as fast as the normal reading speed, because many words—even whole sections of material are skipped. Teachers should tell students the steps for skimming: 1. Read the title. 2. Read the introduction. If there is no introduction, read the first paragraph in its entirety at normal speed all the way through. The opening paragraph often contains an introduction or overview of what will be talked about. 3. Read headings and subheadings. 4. From the second paragraph on, read the first sentence of each paragraph in the body of a text, because the topic sentence is often in the first sentence. However, the topic sentence of each paragraph which in Chinese is often in the last sentence. Pay attention to the difference between Chinese passages and English ones. Don’t mix up with them when skimming. Sometimes read the second sentence with transition word “but”, “however”, and “yet”, etc. Sometimes look for the sentence that is the answer for the question in the first sentence. Sometimes read the second sentence when the first sentence is expressed in terms that are too general. 5. Read the summary. If there is no summary, read more fully the ending paragraphs in its entirety because they often contain a summary.
1.3 Scanning
Scanning is a reading skill used when one wishes to find a single fact or a specific piece of information without reading everything. Scanning is not new to students. Maybe they have used this reading skill many times in daily activities such as looking for the time and channel of a television program in the newspaper listings and in television magazines, or in scanning pages in a telephone directory to find a friend’s address or telephone number.
The question is how to scan. Teachers should tell students to note the arrangement of information. Much of source material that is scanned is arranged alphabetically. A dictionary, the index to a book, and numerous guides and reference listings are arranged alphabetically for quick understanding and easy finding of information. In scanning a telephone directory, for example, students know the name of the person and that the directory is arranged alphabetically according to last names. Thus in trying to find the name of Joseph Sanford, students know that it will be found alphabetically with names that begin with S. Using the guide words at the top of the page, students can find the correct page quickly and begin immediately to scan the alphabetically arrangements of names.
Not all material is arranged alphabetically. But whatever the source of reference, it is arranged in some logical way. In order to save reading time, it is important to know the arrangement of the material in the source being used. To prepare for scanning, therefore, students should take a few minutes to discover the organization of the material. Once familiar with the arrangement of material, students can proceed immediately to find the section or page most likely containing the information desired.
1.4 Guessing the vocabulary
When reading English, students will meet some words that they don’t know. If students stop reading to look up every new word in the dictionary, it will take them a lot of time. So a quick, excellent method of finding the meaning of new words is guessing.
a) Teach students to guess from the context. The context of a word or expression relates to the sentence that the word of expression is in and the sentences that come before and after it. Sometimes a new word is made clear by the context. For example, Mrs. Gao is too fleshy. This dress is so small that she can’t wear it, but now she is on a diet. Here maybe “fleshy” is a new word, but students can guess the meaning from the context of “small—can’t wear—on a diet.” They will easily find that the word “fleshy” means “fat”.
In using the context to decide the meaning of a word, students have to use their knowledge of grammar and their understanding of the author’s ideas. Although there is no formula that students can memorize to improve their ability to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words, teachers should tell them to keep the following points in mind: 1.Use the meanings of the other words in the sentence and the meaning of the sentence as a whole to reduce the number of the possible meanings. 2. Use grammar and punctuation clues that point to the relationships among the various parts of the sentence. 3. Be content with a general idea about the unfamiliar word; the exact definition or synonym is not always necessary. 4. Learn to recognize situations in which it is not necessary to know the meaning of the word.
b) Teach students to guess according to the word-formation, such as prefix and suffix. This skill enables students to guess the meaning of complete new words easily. Teachers can begin to train students in the ability of guessing meaning according to the affixes that they have learned, such as less, -ly, en- and so on. For example, “He is manliness”. “Manliness” may be a new word to students, but the teacher can tell them to figure out its meaning from its suffixes ly and ness. When ly comes after some nouns, usually it makes the nouns into adjectives. So the meaning of “manly” is clear. And the suffix ness usually makes adjectives into nouns, such as selfishness, carefulness, carelessness, thinness… So “manliness” is the noun form of “manly”. If students are guided to pay attention to the component parts of new words in their reading, they will soon find an easy way to guess some new words and enlarge their vocabulary.
c) Teach students to guess from clues of definition. There are usually important phrases to show that the author is giving a definition, such as “namely”, “refer to” , “in other words”, “that is”, etc. Teachers should enable students to recognize these phrases as hints. If students can use these hints in their reading, they will understand text more quickly or even better. For example, Language phatic communion refers to the social interaction of language. There is a hint “refers to” in the sentence. Students don’t need to know the exact meaning of “phatic” or even don’t need to know how to pronounce it, they can guess what it mean. Because of knowing the hint, students can skip over the sentence quickly and go on reading.
Sometimes students may find that they can’t guess what the word means. If the word won’t affect reading, let it be. For example, a German told me that all over China use gourmet powder in their food. It will cause you higher blood pressure. Here as long as students know that “gourmet powder” is a kind of thing that can be eaten, that is enough, it doesn’t matter whether students know what it is.
II. Other important instructional tasks for teachers
2.1 Helping students form a habit of reading
Teachers want students to read better, fast and with full understanding. To do this, students need to read more, but not every student can develop much interest in reading, let alone pleasure. Some students do not enjoy reading. They find it hard to understand what they read, so they read as little as possible. In order to get all the students view reading as a source of enjoyment, teachers should develop students’ interest and help students form a habit of reading.
Teachers can develop students’ interest like these: a) Let students experience happiness by reading interesting stories. b) Get a student who has enjoyed a book to talk about it or write a brief note for display without giving away the end of the story, then let other students to read it themselves. c) Show the class new books and talk a little about each one—enough to whet the appetite but not to give away the plot. d) Encourage students to make or do things arising from their reading. Students may enjoy preparing materials of this kind to interest their friends.
When students have some interest in reading, teachers should tell students to read every day. Teachers should also ask students to read with a purpose: to read to get information; to respond to curiosity about a topic; to follow instructions to perform a task; to know what happening in the world; for pleasure and personal enjoyment and so on. With teachers’ help, gradually, students will form a habit of reading and like to read no matter where they are and when it is.
2.2 Inputting cultural and social knowledge of the English-speaking countries
We should know that learning a foreign language well means not only mastering the pronunciation, grammar, words and idioms, but also seeing the world as native speakers of that language do it, the ways in which their language reflects the ideas, customs and behavior of their society. Therefore, mastering certain cultural and social knowledge is very important, but as English teachers, how to carry out the teaching of cultural and social knowledge? Suggested ways are the following:
a) Select proper teaching material. Teaching material is important. A proportion of foreign material and authentic material should be used, especially dialogues, because it’s more authentic and reflects cultural behavior followed by speakers. Teachers should explain cultural factors involved in the material with purpose.
b) Use good native English videotapes and films in teaching and then organize discussions. When watching videotapes or seeing a film, students and the teacher should pay attention to the sentences of daily life, such as conversations between shopkeepers and clients, dialogues on telephone, chat in the street, etc. At last, the teacher and students may imitate the roles and give a performance in front of the class.
c) Hold some lectures about cultures and customs, comparing Chinese culture with western culture. The Teacher and students can exchange views and replenish each other.
When students accumulate some cultural and social knowledge, teachers can provide cultural information as well as make students express themselves correctly in different occasions. In this way, students can widen their knowledge and thus further learn English well.
2.3 Choosing reading materials for students
In order to develop students’ skills, English teachers should choose reading materials for them. The materials must be meaningful.
Three main criteria influence the choice of materials:
a) Suitability of content. The content should not be too long or too short; the content should not be too easy or too difficult; the content should be interesting, various and authentic.
b) Exploitability. Exploitability，that is, facilitation of learning. When the teacher exploits a text, he will make use of it to develop students’ competence. A text the teacher cannot exploit is no use for teaching or no use for students’ reading. When the teacher assesses texts for exploitability, he should consider the possibilities not only for practicing individual skills, but for outcomes requiring the integrated use of many skills together: the unitary skill of making sense of text. So the materials can be used to develop students’ many skills are good and exploitable.
c) Readability. The term readability is often used to refer to the combination of structural and lexical difficulty. Since the language of a text may be difficult for one student and easy for another, it is necessary to assess the right level for students; to do this, teachers must assess the level of students themselves. If the teacher knows the class, he already has a good idea of what vocabulary and structures they are familiar with. If the teacher does not know the class well, he will have to find this out; maybe a series of tests can help. Once the teacher knows the students’ vocabulary level, he can count the new lexical items, words or phrases in a text, and then have to decide what proportion of new items is acceptable. And the structure is harder to assess. A more likely cause of structural difficulty is sentence length and complexity. New grammatical forms, tenses, structural words, etc, often cause fewer problems if the text is comprehensible in other respects. So teachers need to work out the readability index of texts that they are suitable for students.
2.4 Monitoring extensive reading
The middle school students’ autonomous reading ability should be trained. Some students never feel the need to read at all and thus never develop the habit or the skill, so English teachers should require students to read outside of class. Tell them to keep the habit of reading.
Apart from requiring students to read, teachers should monitor their reading. A text or a book is studied more effectively if students are given a specific purpose. Teachers can ask students to find certain information, answer some questions, recite a short passage, and retell the story and so on. Teachers should check them from time to time, so as to learn from students’ reading results, and then give them appropriate assessments. The record of what each student reads and problems he has helps teachers keep an eye on students who are not progressing.
In a word, students’ extracurricular reading should be guided by teachers. Especially for weak readers, teachers should give them more encouragement and more simple tasks so that they can experience success and gain confidence in reading.
Conclusion
In this article, I have mentioned that teaching students four reading skills and finishing four important instructional tasks are effective ways to improve students’ extensive reading ability. The skills mostly needed in students’ extensive reading activities have to be taught and trained. And the important instructional tasks for teachers are necessary. By doing so, students will learn the method for independent general reading outside of class. In other words, we should teach our students how to fish instead of simply giving them some fish.
（作者单位：广东省河源市龙川县实验中学）
Key words: English extensive reading teaching; skills; tasks
Introduction
One of the obvious characteristics of the New English Curriculum Criteria for junior school stresses that English vocabulary should be enlarged and reading ability should be improved. Reading and enlarging vocabulary are interrelated. English vocabulary can naturally be enlarged in extensive reading. Nowadays in English examinations, reading comprehension covers about forty percent. So reading plays a very important role in students’ English study.
Reading includes intensive reading and extensive reading. Intensive reading teaching is to teach students basic language knowledge and integrated ability to read. It stresses the improvement of students’ accuracy to the English language. However, extensive reading teaching has its own significance: a) Through extensive reading teaching, students can further consolidate and enlarge their vocabulary; b) Students can input more language information and widen their range of knowledge; c) Students can practice their skills widely by reading different writings; d)Students’ reading comprehension can be improved, such as they will be more skilful to cope with long and complicated sentences, to distinguish the main idea from supporting details, to recognize the author’s point of views, etc; e) Understanding the English-speaking countries’ culture and society better; f) Their interest of learning English can be further strengthened. From above, we can see the importance of extensive reading teaching, so teachers must expand intensive reading teaching in class into extensive reading teaching outside of class and compensate for the shortage of intensive reading teaching, so as to improve students’ extracurricular reading ability.
The ability to read extensively and efficiently will have to be taught so that students of learning English will come in contact largely and solely with different writings outside of class. According to my practice and experience in teaching students’ extensive reading in English, I think that teachers should teach students extensive reading skills, four skills are most needed for middle school students in their reading activities and should be trained to improve students’ extensive reading ability. Besides this, teachers should also accomplish four important tasks to ensure students’ extensive reading to carry on effectively.
I. Four extensive reading skills
1.1 Predicting
Teachers can ask students to think about some questions about the text before reading—namely, predicting. When students predict something, their thinking is developing. If predicting is used correctly in English reading, it can do a great deal to students’ reading comprehension. It is an important extensive reading skill.
Students’ predictions, no matter right or wrong, will get their mind closer to the theme of the text to be read. Then the real reading will either confirm or reject the predictions. The reading results will be better than the situation where students start reading with a blank mind. So teachers must teach students how to make predictions before reading a text.
Predictions can be done in three ways.
a) Predicting based on the titles. Good titles always contain the most important information of a written text. Predictions based on studying the title seldom go far wrong. Teachers should ask students to observe the title of a text carefully and tell them to give out their predictions such as the content, the style, and the theme of the text and so on. These predictions focus students’ reading by limiting the range of things to look out for, and read more efficiently.
b) Predicting based on vocabulary. Having made the predictions based on the title, students can be asked to predict some lexical items that they think are likely to occur in the text or the teacher gives them some key words to predict. Then students read the text fast to confirm their predictions. These important lexical items linked together can show the main idea of a text, and students may find the text so predictable that they hardly need to read it all and know what the writer will talk about.
c) Predicting based on the T/F questions. Before students reading a text, the teacher can give them some true or false statements. Students glance at these statements and predict if they are true or false. When students go through the text they will know if they have made the right predictions and then students will make sense of the text and finish other reading purposes better and faster.
1.2 Skimming
Skimming means reading quickly to get the gist, i.e. the main idea of the text. The purpose of skimming is to get the general meaning of something students are reading for pleasure or to get an overview of material that students are reading for the first time. Skimming is also appropriate for reviewing material that students have read previously. So there are generally three skimming methods—preview, overview and review.
Middle school students should be encouraged to try to use this skill in their reading activities. The reading rate for skimming may be twice as fast as the normal reading speed, because many words—even whole sections of material are skipped. Teachers should tell students the steps for skimming: 1. Read the title. 2. Read the introduction. If there is no introduction, read the first paragraph in its entirety at normal speed all the way through. The opening paragraph often contains an introduction or overview of what will be talked about. 3. Read headings and subheadings. 4. From the second paragraph on, read the first sentence of each paragraph in the body of a text, because the topic sentence is often in the first sentence. However, the topic sentence of each paragraph which in Chinese is often in the last sentence. Pay attention to the difference between Chinese passages and English ones. Don’t mix up with them when skimming. Sometimes read the second sentence with transition word “but”, “however”, and “yet”, etc. Sometimes look for the sentence that is the answer for the question in the first sentence. Sometimes read the second sentence when the first sentence is expressed in terms that are too general. 5. Read the summary. If there is no summary, read more fully the ending paragraphs in its entirety because they often contain a summary.
1.3 Scanning
Scanning is a reading skill used when one wishes to find a single fact or a specific piece of information without reading everything. Scanning is not new to students. Maybe they have used this reading skill many times in daily activities such as looking for the time and channel of a television program in the newspaper listings and in television magazines, or in scanning pages in a telephone directory to find a friend’s address or telephone number.
The question is how to scan. Teachers should tell students to note the arrangement of information. Much of source material that is scanned is arranged alphabetically. A dictionary, the index to a book, and numerous guides and reference listings are arranged alphabetically for quick understanding and easy finding of information. In scanning a telephone directory, for example, students know the name of the person and that the directory is arranged alphabetically according to last names. Thus in trying to find the name of Joseph Sanford, students know that it will be found alphabetically with names that begin with S. Using the guide words at the top of the page, students can find the correct page quickly and begin immediately to scan the alphabetically arrangements of names.
Not all material is arranged alphabetically. But whatever the source of reference, it is arranged in some logical way. In order to save reading time, it is important to know the arrangement of the material in the source being used. To prepare for scanning, therefore, students should take a few minutes to discover the organization of the material. Once familiar with the arrangement of material, students can proceed immediately to find the section or page most likely containing the information desired.
1.4 Guessing the vocabulary
When reading English, students will meet some words that they don’t know. If students stop reading to look up every new word in the dictionary, it will take them a lot of time. So a quick, excellent method of finding the meaning of new words is guessing.
a) Teach students to guess from the context. The context of a word or expression relates to the sentence that the word of expression is in and the sentences that come before and after it. Sometimes a new word is made clear by the context. For example, Mrs. Gao is too fleshy. This dress is so small that she can’t wear it, but now she is on a diet. Here maybe “fleshy” is a new word, but students can guess the meaning from the context of “small—can’t wear—on a diet.” They will easily find that the word “fleshy” means “fat”.
In using the context to decide the meaning of a word, students have to use their knowledge of grammar and their understanding of the author’s ideas. Although there is no formula that students can memorize to improve their ability to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words, teachers should tell them to keep the following points in mind: 1.Use the meanings of the other words in the sentence and the meaning of the sentence as a whole to reduce the number of the possible meanings. 2. Use grammar and punctuation clues that point to the relationships among the various parts of the sentence. 3. Be content with a general idea about the unfamiliar word; the exact definition or synonym is not always necessary. 4. Learn to recognize situations in which it is not necessary to know the meaning of the word.
b) Teach students to guess according to the word-formation, such as prefix and suffix. This skill enables students to guess the meaning of complete new words easily. Teachers can begin to train students in the ability of guessing meaning according to the affixes that they have learned, such as less, -ly, en- and so on. For example, “He is manliness”. “Manliness” may be a new word to students, but the teacher can tell them to figure out its meaning from its suffixes ly and ness. When ly comes after some nouns, usually it makes the nouns into adjectives. So the meaning of “manly” is clear. And the suffix ness usually makes adjectives into nouns, such as selfishness, carefulness, carelessness, thinness… So “manliness” is the noun form of “manly”. If students are guided to pay attention to the component parts of new words in their reading, they will soon find an easy way to guess some new words and enlarge their vocabulary.
c) Teach students to guess from clues of definition. There are usually important phrases to show that the author is giving a definition, such as “namely”, “refer to” , “in other words”, “that is”, etc. Teachers should enable students to recognize these phrases as hints. If students can use these hints in their reading, they will understand text more quickly or even better. For example, Language phatic communion refers to the social interaction of language. There is a hint “refers to” in the sentence. Students don’t need to know the exact meaning of “phatic” or even don’t need to know how to pronounce it, they can guess what it mean. Because of knowing the hint, students can skip over the sentence quickly and go on reading.
Sometimes students may find that they can’t guess what the word means. If the word won’t affect reading, let it be. For example, a German told me that all over China use gourmet powder in their food. It will cause you higher blood pressure. Here as long as students know that “gourmet powder” is a kind of thing that can be eaten, that is enough, it doesn’t matter whether students know what it is.
II. Other important instructional tasks for teachers
2.1 Helping students form a habit of reading
Teachers want students to read better, fast and with full understanding. To do this, students need to read more, but not every student can develop much interest in reading, let alone pleasure. Some students do not enjoy reading. They find it hard to understand what they read, so they read as little as possible. In order to get all the students view reading as a source of enjoyment, teachers should develop students’ interest and help students form a habit of reading.
Teachers can develop students’ interest like these: a) Let students experience happiness by reading interesting stories. b) Get a student who has enjoyed a book to talk about it or write a brief note for display without giving away the end of the story, then let other students to read it themselves. c) Show the class new books and talk a little about each one—enough to whet the appetite but not to give away the plot. d) Encourage students to make or do things arising from their reading. Students may enjoy preparing materials of this kind to interest their friends.
When students have some interest in reading, teachers should tell students to read every day. Teachers should also ask students to read with a purpose: to read to get information; to respond to curiosity about a topic; to follow instructions to perform a task; to know what happening in the world; for pleasure and personal enjoyment and so on. With teachers’ help, gradually, students will form a habit of reading and like to read no matter where they are and when it is.
2.2 Inputting cultural and social knowledge of the English-speaking countries
We should know that learning a foreign language well means not only mastering the pronunciation, grammar, words and idioms, but also seeing the world as native speakers of that language do it, the ways in which their language reflects the ideas, customs and behavior of their society. Therefore, mastering certain cultural and social knowledge is very important, but as English teachers, how to carry out the teaching of cultural and social knowledge? Suggested ways are the following:
a) Select proper teaching material. Teaching material is important. A proportion of foreign material and authentic material should be used, especially dialogues, because it’s more authentic and reflects cultural behavior followed by speakers. Teachers should explain cultural factors involved in the material with purpose.
b) Use good native English videotapes and films in teaching and then organize discussions. When watching videotapes or seeing a film, students and the teacher should pay attention to the sentences of daily life, such as conversations between shopkeepers and clients, dialogues on telephone, chat in the street, etc. At last, the teacher and students may imitate the roles and give a performance in front of the class.
c) Hold some lectures about cultures and customs, comparing Chinese culture with western culture. The Teacher and students can exchange views and replenish each other.
When students accumulate some cultural and social knowledge, teachers can provide cultural information as well as make students express themselves correctly in different occasions. In this way, students can widen their knowledge and thus further learn English well.
2.3 Choosing reading materials for students
In order to develop students’ skills, English teachers should choose reading materials for them. The materials must be meaningful.
Three main criteria influence the choice of materials:
a) Suitability of content. The content should not be too long or too short; the content should not be too easy or too difficult; the content should be interesting, various and authentic.
b) Exploitability. Exploitability，that is, facilitation of learning. When the teacher exploits a text, he will make use of it to develop students’ competence. A text the teacher cannot exploit is no use for teaching or no use for students’ reading. When the teacher assesses texts for exploitability, he should consider the possibilities not only for practicing individual skills, but for outcomes requiring the integrated use of many skills together: the unitary skill of making sense of text. So the materials can be used to develop students’ many skills are good and exploitable.
c) Readability. The term readability is often used to refer to the combination of structural and lexical difficulty. Since the language of a text may be difficult for one student and easy for another, it is necessary to assess the right level for students; to do this, teachers must assess the level of students themselves. If the teacher knows the class, he already has a good idea of what vocabulary and structures they are familiar with. If the teacher does not know the class well, he will have to find this out; maybe a series of tests can help. Once the teacher knows the students’ vocabulary level, he can count the new lexical items, words or phrases in a text, and then have to decide what proportion of new items is acceptable. And the structure is harder to assess. A more likely cause of structural difficulty is sentence length and complexity. New grammatical forms, tenses, structural words, etc, often cause fewer problems if the text is comprehensible in other respects. So teachers need to work out the readability index of texts that they are suitable for students.
2.4 Monitoring extensive reading
The middle school students’ autonomous reading ability should be trained. Some students never feel the need to read at all and thus never develop the habit or the skill, so English teachers should require students to read outside of class. Tell them to keep the habit of reading.
Apart from requiring students to read, teachers should monitor their reading. A text or a book is studied more effectively if students are given a specific purpose. Teachers can ask students to find certain information, answer some questions, recite a short passage, and retell the story and so on. Teachers should check them from time to time, so as to learn from students’ reading results, and then give them appropriate assessments. The record of what each student reads and problems he has helps teachers keep an eye on students who are not progressing.
In a word, students’ extracurricular reading should be guided by teachers. Especially for weak readers, teachers should give them more encouragement and more simple tasks so that they can experience success and gain confidence in reading.
Conclusion
In this article, I have mentioned that teaching students four reading skills and finishing four important instructional tasks are effective ways to improve students’ extensive reading ability. The skills mostly needed in students’ extensive reading activities have to be taught and trained. And the important instructional tasks for teachers are necessary. By doing so, students will learn the method for independent general reading outside of class. In other words, we should teach our students how to fish instead of simply giving them some fish.
（作者单位：广东省河源市龙川县实验中学）