论文部分内容阅读
摘 要:阅读是对书面语言的理解过程。阅读理解在中国中学生英语教学中的重要性已经世所公认。根据认知理论,在阅读理解中有一些因素起着非常重要的作用。 本文以文件综述的方式对影响英语阅读理解的各种因素进行了探讨。
关键词:Reading comprehension affecting factors
Introduction
In the modern society, reading comprehension is becoming more and more important. There are few aspects of our lives that are not linked in one way or another to reading. As far as language acquisition is concerned, reading is the most important skill in the four basic skills for middleschool students in China (MSSC). Reading comprehension appears in most standard tests and is regarded as an important part in them. For most Chinese middleschool students, reading is the most efficient way to learn English. The ability to read English articles is becoming more important for MSSC since the new secondary school English teaching syllabus is established.
But reading is a very complicated process. It is not only a dynamic cognitive process but also a complex interplay of reader, text and situational context. It is impossible to separate any act of comprehension from the contextual factors that influence it (Spiro, 1980). The individual readers characteristics (reader variable), the specific text being read (text variable), and the total situation (situational variable) all exert a strong influence on what is comprehended.
1 Readerbased Variables
1.1 General Language Proficiency
Both Topdown and interactive models emphasize that readers play an active and significant role in the psycholinguistic reading process. The characteristics of the individual reader affect what is comprehended, because the reader actively interprets the cues on the printed pages in the light of what he or she brings to it. Increasing attention has been paid to the ways in which readers may influence reading test performance. General language proficiency of readers is considered to be the crucial one. Many secondlanguage teachers believe that poor secondlanguage reading is due to a lack of good reading abilities/skills/habits in the first language. Clarke (1980) found that students limited control of the second language forced them to revert to poor readers strategies, that is, it “shortcircuited” the reading process.
Hudson( 1982) accepted Clarkes short circuit hypothesis, but argues that students can override these short circuits if they are encouraged to call up the relevant schemata. Alderson( 1984) concluded that there is likely to be a language threshold beyond which secondlanguage readers have to progress before their fastlanguage reading abilities can transfer to the secondlanguage situation. Carrell (1991) further commented that proficiency level in the second language is more crucial for learners at slightly lower proficiency levels when compared to learners at slightly higher level. Poor secondlanguage reading performance is likely to be due to insufficient language knowledge, and any attempt at remediation might more profitably pay attention to the linguistic problem than to any supposed reading deficit(A lderson,20 00)
1.2 Prior knowledge
A successful reading depends not only on the readers language proficiency, but also on his or her mastery of prior knowledge. “Every act of comprehension involves ones knowledge of the world as well”. (Anderson, Reynolds, Schallert and Goetz, 1977). Prior knowledge is so necessary for comprehension that some speculate that it can often account for a large portion of the difference between successful and unsuccessful readers. Some researches on prior knowledge in reading suggest that a high degree of prior knowledge can overcome linguistic deficiencies in that it helps the reader retrieve information to contribute to his comprehension( e.g. Hudson,1982).
The development of cognitive theory has attempted to account for the consistent finding that what readers know affects what they understand. Cognitive theory is an explanation of how readers use prior knowledge to comprehend and learn from text (Rumelhart, 1980).
1.3 Reading Skills
Although prior knowledge of the readers has a profound effect on their reading comprehension, the attainment of sufficient prior knowledge does not guarantee that they can accomplish their task successfully. A good command of reading is also needed. The combination of prior knowledge with effective reading skill will help readers to understand the reading materials better. A reading skill can be described roughly as a cognitive ability which a person is able to use when interacting with written texts. In spite of the wide range of reading material specially written or adapted for English language learning purposes, there are few comprehensive systematic which have been constructed from a detailed analysis of the skills required for efficient reading (Heaton, 1991). Thus, unlike comprehension, which can be viewed as product of reading a particular text, skills are seen as part of the generalized reading process.
Various attempts have been made to arrange skills into categories. Davis (1968) identified four skills: (I) identify word meaning, (II) drawing inferences, (III) identifying writers technique and recognizing the mood of the passage, (IV) finding answers to questions. According to the new English Teaching Syllabus, if students want to do efficient reading, they have to develop some basic reading skills, which are listed below:
1. Understanding the topic and main idea
2. Recognizing important facts and details
3. Making inferences
4. Drawing conclusions
5. Identifying the authors point of view, attitude or purpose
6. Figuring out the meaning of an unknown word and phrase in context
7. Understanding the relationship within sentences
8. Skimming to get the gist of a reading material
9. Scanning to find a particular piece of information
The requirements for the reading tests of Senior Middleschool Entrance Examination of English are quite similar to those skills listed in new English Teaching Syllabus for middleschool students:
1. Understanding the topic and main idea
2. Recognizing specific details
3. Understanding conceptual meanings
4. Making inferences and drawing conclusions
5. Figuring out the meaning of an unknown word and phrase in context
6. Understanding the structures and the relationship between sentences and that between paragraphs
7. Identifying the authors attitude
2 Textbased Variables
2.1 Text Readability
Some of the earliest work on language reading focused on whether certain text elements especially influence reading comprehension. Mezynski (1983) finds that vocabulary knowledge accounts for substantial proportions of the variance in reading comprehension. Kern (1988) finds foreign and second language students repeatedly claim that lack of vocabulary knowledge is a major problem when reading. Many researchers have also investigated the importance of syntax. Berman (1984) finds that Hebrewspeaking college students studying English read a syntactically simplified text significantly more easily than a similar unsimplified text. Rayner (1990) also finds that knowledge of structure has an important facilitative effect on reading. The more syntactically complex the sentence, the more difficult it is to understand.
Readability is the combination of structural and lexical difficulty, which can be measured by formulas. There are many readability formulas available. Some formulas attempt to measure semantic complexity by assessing the number or percentage of “hard words” (usually defined as unfamiliar words or words with three or more syllables). Most formulas measure the syntactic complexity. This is usually measured by counting the average number of words per sentence. Flesh readability formula is often used to measure the syntactic complexity of reading passages. Flesh readability formula is like this:
RE=206.84-0.85w1-1.02s1
RE: Readability Ease
wl: the average number of syllables per 100 words
sl: the average number of words per sentence
2.2 Cohesion
Cohesion refers to the way in which ideas and meaning in a text relate to each other.
Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another. According to Halliday and Hasan(1976), there are two types of cohesion relations: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion.
Grammatical cohesion includes reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. Many researchers have done experiments to study the relationship between conjunctions and reading comprehension. Conjunctions express certain meanings which presuppose the presence of other components in the discourse, for example, and, or, but and so.
Through an experiment, Malcolm Cooper( 1986) argues that sentence connectors help readers understand the relationship of the context better. In lexical cohesion, a tie is made between one sentence or phrase and another by virtue of the lexical relationship between certain words in the sentence. For instance, the same word used earlier is reiterated. Other forms of lexical cohesion may be based on relationships such as synonymy and hyponym.
Cohesion plays an important role in discourse. When a cohesive relation is set up between two elements, they are thereby at least potentially integrated into a text. Thus, cohesion is the textual realization of semantic and pragmatic relations betweensentences or clauses.
3 Situationbased variables
3.1 Reading Purposes
Researches also show that reading comprehension is affected by the total situation. Clear purpose is an important component of successful comprehension task. Duchastel (1979) finds in his research that when students know the objectives of their assignment, they do better. Mayer(1975) finds that students may perform differently according to the task they deal with. The readers may read for information ( e.g. read newspaper), read for academic knowledge (e.g. read textbooks) and read for entertainment ( e.g. read novels).A student reading a magazine in the train is likely to comprehend differently from a similar student reading the same article to prepare for a debate. An ESL student reading an English story book for pleasure isquite different from a similar student reading the same story to improve his or her English reading ability. Students can adjust their reading strategies to the purpose for reading. Thus a clear purpose and an appropriate method are important components of successful comprehension tasks.
3.2 Social Context
The social context in which reading occurs will also affect the students comprehension. This context includes such things as the audience, the teacherstudent relationship and the purpose of the assessment task. Mosenthal(1984) concludes that the interaction between the Audience and Reader Contexts plays an important role in how students comprehend during reading lessons. According to Mosenthal and Na (1980), normal reading lessons are assumed to be lowrisk situations and testing situations are assumed to be highrisk situations. They find that during normal reading lessons, the interaction between the teacher and the students plays an important role in comprehension. Whereas performance in testing situation is related to ability: averageability students desire to minimize the risk in the testing situation and highability students desire to process the text fully.
In summary, Reading is an interactive and cognitive process that is dependent on the individuals linguistic proficiency, prior knowledge, reading skills and purpose of reading. General language proficiency of readers also plays an important role in reading comprehension. In the cognitiontheoretical view reading is an interaction process, which includes interaction between bottomup skills, or decoding the text, and topdown processing, or using prior knowledge.
参考文献
1. Allwright, D. Observation in the language classroom [M]. London: Longman. 1988
2. Doughty,C.& William,J. Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition [M]. New York:Cambridge University Press. 1998
3. Ellis,R. 第二语言习得[M].上海:上海外语教育出版社,2000.
4. Ellis, R. Instructed Second Language Acquisition [M]. Oxford:Basil Blackwell. 1990
5. Ellis, R. SLA Research and Language Teaching [M]. Oxford:Oxford University Press. 1997
6. Ellis, R. Second Languag eAcquisition through interaction [M]. Amsterdan: John Bejamins. 1999
7. Ellis, R. Does formfocused instruction affect the acquisition of implicit knowledge? A review of the research[J]. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 24, 2002.
8. Fungerer & H. J. Schmid,An introduction to cognitive linguistics [M] Foreign Language Teaching and Researching Press,2001.
9. Gibson, E.J. & Levin, H. (1975). The Psychology of Reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
10. Klein Wolfgang. Second Language Acquisition [M]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1986.
11. Jeremy Roschelle. Knowledge and New ExperienceUniversity of Massachusetts, Press,2000.
12. Jack C. Richards & Charles Lockhart. Reflective teaching in second language classrooms Cambridge University Press. 1996
13. Krashen,S. Principles and practice in second language acquisition [M]. Oxford: Pergamon. 1982.
14. Long, M. Does second language instruction make a difference? A review of the research [J]. TESOL Quarterly, 17, 1983.
15. Lamb, Sydney M. The Crooked Path of Progress in Cognitive Linguistics. Georgetown University Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics 24:99123. 1971.
16. Langacker, Ronald W. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar Vol. 2: Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1991.
17. Mclaughlin, B., Theories of Second Language Acquisition [M]. London: Edward Arnold. 1987.
18. Neil. J. Anderson. Exploring second language reading: issues and strategies [M] Foreign Language Teaching and Researching Press, 2004.
19. Penny Ur, 语言教学教程:实践与理论[M]. 北京: 外语教学与研究出版社,2000.
20. Pica, T. Secondlanguage acquisition, social interaction, and the classroom [J]. Applied linguistics. 8, 1987:3-21.
21. Pienemann, M, Psychological constraints on the teach ability of languages [J],SSLA, 6, 1984: 186-214
22. Resnick, L.B. & Weaver, P.A. (1979). Theory and Practice of Early Reading, Volumes I-III. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
23. Van Lier, L., The Classroom and the Language Learner [M].London: Longman. 1988
24. W.Littlewood,交际语言教学论[M]. 北京:外语教学与研究出版社,2000.
25. 高强,外语交际课堂内的语言形式教学探讨——国外研究新发展[J].当代教育科学.2005,(12)
26. 黄和斌等, 外语教学理论与实践[M].南京:译林出版社,2001
关键词:Reading comprehension affecting factors
Introduction
In the modern society, reading comprehension is becoming more and more important. There are few aspects of our lives that are not linked in one way or another to reading. As far as language acquisition is concerned, reading is the most important skill in the four basic skills for middleschool students in China (MSSC). Reading comprehension appears in most standard tests and is regarded as an important part in them. For most Chinese middleschool students, reading is the most efficient way to learn English. The ability to read English articles is becoming more important for MSSC since the new secondary school English teaching syllabus is established.
But reading is a very complicated process. It is not only a dynamic cognitive process but also a complex interplay of reader, text and situational context. It is impossible to separate any act of comprehension from the contextual factors that influence it (Spiro, 1980). The individual readers characteristics (reader variable), the specific text being read (text variable), and the total situation (situational variable) all exert a strong influence on what is comprehended.
1 Readerbased Variables
1.1 General Language Proficiency
Both Topdown and interactive models emphasize that readers play an active and significant role in the psycholinguistic reading process. The characteristics of the individual reader affect what is comprehended, because the reader actively interprets the cues on the printed pages in the light of what he or she brings to it. Increasing attention has been paid to the ways in which readers may influence reading test performance. General language proficiency of readers is considered to be the crucial one. Many secondlanguage teachers believe that poor secondlanguage reading is due to a lack of good reading abilities/skills/habits in the first language. Clarke (1980) found that students limited control of the second language forced them to revert to poor readers strategies, that is, it “shortcircuited” the reading process.
Hudson( 1982) accepted Clarkes short circuit hypothesis, but argues that students can override these short circuits if they are encouraged to call up the relevant schemata. Alderson( 1984) concluded that there is likely to be a language threshold beyond which secondlanguage readers have to progress before their fastlanguage reading abilities can transfer to the secondlanguage situation. Carrell (1991) further commented that proficiency level in the second language is more crucial for learners at slightly lower proficiency levels when compared to learners at slightly higher level. Poor secondlanguage reading performance is likely to be due to insufficient language knowledge, and any attempt at remediation might more profitably pay attention to the linguistic problem than to any supposed reading deficit(A lderson,20 00)
1.2 Prior knowledge
A successful reading depends not only on the readers language proficiency, but also on his or her mastery of prior knowledge. “Every act of comprehension involves ones knowledge of the world as well”. (Anderson, Reynolds, Schallert and Goetz, 1977). Prior knowledge is so necessary for comprehension that some speculate that it can often account for a large portion of the difference between successful and unsuccessful readers. Some researches on prior knowledge in reading suggest that a high degree of prior knowledge can overcome linguistic deficiencies in that it helps the reader retrieve information to contribute to his comprehension( e.g. Hudson,1982).
The development of cognitive theory has attempted to account for the consistent finding that what readers know affects what they understand. Cognitive theory is an explanation of how readers use prior knowledge to comprehend and learn from text (Rumelhart, 1980).
1.3 Reading Skills
Although prior knowledge of the readers has a profound effect on their reading comprehension, the attainment of sufficient prior knowledge does not guarantee that they can accomplish their task successfully. A good command of reading is also needed. The combination of prior knowledge with effective reading skill will help readers to understand the reading materials better. A reading skill can be described roughly as a cognitive ability which a person is able to use when interacting with written texts. In spite of the wide range of reading material specially written or adapted for English language learning purposes, there are few comprehensive systematic which have been constructed from a detailed analysis of the skills required for efficient reading (Heaton, 1991). Thus, unlike comprehension, which can be viewed as product of reading a particular text, skills are seen as part of the generalized reading process.
Various attempts have been made to arrange skills into categories. Davis (1968) identified four skills: (I) identify word meaning, (II) drawing inferences, (III) identifying writers technique and recognizing the mood of the passage, (IV) finding answers to questions. According to the new English Teaching Syllabus, if students want to do efficient reading, they have to develop some basic reading skills, which are listed below:
1. Understanding the topic and main idea
2. Recognizing important facts and details
3. Making inferences
4. Drawing conclusions
5. Identifying the authors point of view, attitude or purpose
6. Figuring out the meaning of an unknown word and phrase in context
7. Understanding the relationship within sentences
8. Skimming to get the gist of a reading material
9. Scanning to find a particular piece of information
The requirements for the reading tests of Senior Middleschool Entrance Examination of English are quite similar to those skills listed in new English Teaching Syllabus for middleschool students:
1. Understanding the topic and main idea
2. Recognizing specific details
3. Understanding conceptual meanings
4. Making inferences and drawing conclusions
5. Figuring out the meaning of an unknown word and phrase in context
6. Understanding the structures and the relationship between sentences and that between paragraphs
7. Identifying the authors attitude
2 Textbased Variables
2.1 Text Readability
Some of the earliest work on language reading focused on whether certain text elements especially influence reading comprehension. Mezynski (1983) finds that vocabulary knowledge accounts for substantial proportions of the variance in reading comprehension. Kern (1988) finds foreign and second language students repeatedly claim that lack of vocabulary knowledge is a major problem when reading. Many researchers have also investigated the importance of syntax. Berman (1984) finds that Hebrewspeaking college students studying English read a syntactically simplified text significantly more easily than a similar unsimplified text. Rayner (1990) also finds that knowledge of structure has an important facilitative effect on reading. The more syntactically complex the sentence, the more difficult it is to understand.
Readability is the combination of structural and lexical difficulty, which can be measured by formulas. There are many readability formulas available. Some formulas attempt to measure semantic complexity by assessing the number or percentage of “hard words” (usually defined as unfamiliar words or words with three or more syllables). Most formulas measure the syntactic complexity. This is usually measured by counting the average number of words per sentence. Flesh readability formula is often used to measure the syntactic complexity of reading passages. Flesh readability formula is like this:
RE=206.84-0.85w1-1.02s1
RE: Readability Ease
wl: the average number of syllables per 100 words
sl: the average number of words per sentence
2.2 Cohesion
Cohesion refers to the way in which ideas and meaning in a text relate to each other.
Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another. According to Halliday and Hasan(1976), there are two types of cohesion relations: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion.
Grammatical cohesion includes reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. Many researchers have done experiments to study the relationship between conjunctions and reading comprehension. Conjunctions express certain meanings which presuppose the presence of other components in the discourse, for example, and, or, but and so.
Through an experiment, Malcolm Cooper( 1986) argues that sentence connectors help readers understand the relationship of the context better. In lexical cohesion, a tie is made between one sentence or phrase and another by virtue of the lexical relationship between certain words in the sentence. For instance, the same word used earlier is reiterated. Other forms of lexical cohesion may be based on relationships such as synonymy and hyponym.
Cohesion plays an important role in discourse. When a cohesive relation is set up between two elements, they are thereby at least potentially integrated into a text. Thus, cohesion is the textual realization of semantic and pragmatic relations betweensentences or clauses.
3 Situationbased variables
3.1 Reading Purposes
Researches also show that reading comprehension is affected by the total situation. Clear purpose is an important component of successful comprehension task. Duchastel (1979) finds in his research that when students know the objectives of their assignment, they do better. Mayer(1975) finds that students may perform differently according to the task they deal with. The readers may read for information ( e.g. read newspaper), read for academic knowledge (e.g. read textbooks) and read for entertainment ( e.g. read novels).A student reading a magazine in the train is likely to comprehend differently from a similar student reading the same article to prepare for a debate. An ESL student reading an English story book for pleasure isquite different from a similar student reading the same story to improve his or her English reading ability. Students can adjust their reading strategies to the purpose for reading. Thus a clear purpose and an appropriate method are important components of successful comprehension tasks.
3.2 Social Context
The social context in which reading occurs will also affect the students comprehension. This context includes such things as the audience, the teacherstudent relationship and the purpose of the assessment task. Mosenthal(1984) concludes that the interaction between the Audience and Reader Contexts plays an important role in how students comprehend during reading lessons. According to Mosenthal and Na (1980), normal reading lessons are assumed to be lowrisk situations and testing situations are assumed to be highrisk situations. They find that during normal reading lessons, the interaction between the teacher and the students plays an important role in comprehension. Whereas performance in testing situation is related to ability: averageability students desire to minimize the risk in the testing situation and highability students desire to process the text fully.
In summary, Reading is an interactive and cognitive process that is dependent on the individuals linguistic proficiency, prior knowledge, reading skills and purpose of reading. General language proficiency of readers also plays an important role in reading comprehension. In the cognitiontheoretical view reading is an interaction process, which includes interaction between bottomup skills, or decoding the text, and topdown processing, or using prior knowledge.
参考文献
1. Allwright, D. Observation in the language classroom [M]. London: Longman. 1988
2. Doughty,C.& William,J. Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition [M]. New York:Cambridge University Press. 1998
3. Ellis,R. 第二语言习得[M].上海:上海外语教育出版社,2000.
4. Ellis, R. Instructed Second Language Acquisition [M]. Oxford:Basil Blackwell. 1990
5. Ellis, R. SLA Research and Language Teaching [M]. Oxford:Oxford University Press. 1997
6. Ellis, R. Second Languag eAcquisition through interaction [M]. Amsterdan: John Bejamins. 1999
7. Ellis, R. Does formfocused instruction affect the acquisition of implicit knowledge? A review of the research[J]. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 24, 2002.
8. Fungerer & H. J. Schmid,An introduction to cognitive linguistics [M] Foreign Language Teaching and Researching Press,2001.
9. Gibson, E.J. & Levin, H. (1975). The Psychology of Reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
10. Klein Wolfgang. Second Language Acquisition [M]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1986.
11. Jeremy Roschelle. Knowledge and New ExperienceUniversity of Massachusetts, Press,2000.
12. Jack C. Richards & Charles Lockhart. Reflective teaching in second language classrooms Cambridge University Press. 1996
13. Krashen,S. Principles and practice in second language acquisition [M]. Oxford: Pergamon. 1982.
14. Long, M. Does second language instruction make a difference? A review of the research [J]. TESOL Quarterly, 17, 1983.
15. Lamb, Sydney M. The Crooked Path of Progress in Cognitive Linguistics. Georgetown University Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics 24:99123. 1971.
16. Langacker, Ronald W. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar Vol. 2: Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1991.
17. Mclaughlin, B., Theories of Second Language Acquisition [M]. London: Edward Arnold. 1987.
18. Neil. J. Anderson. Exploring second language reading: issues and strategies [M] Foreign Language Teaching and Researching Press, 2004.
19. Penny Ur, 语言教学教程:实践与理论[M]. 北京: 外语教学与研究出版社,2000.
20. Pica, T. Secondlanguage acquisition, social interaction, and the classroom [J]. Applied linguistics. 8, 1987:3-21.
21. Pienemann, M, Psychological constraints on the teach ability of languages [J],SSLA, 6, 1984: 186-214
22. Resnick, L.B. & Weaver, P.A. (1979). Theory and Practice of Early Reading, Volumes I-III. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
23. Van Lier, L., The Classroom and the Language Learner [M].London: Longman. 1988
24. W.Littlewood,交际语言教学论[M]. 北京:外语教学与研究出版社,2000.
25. 高强,外语交际课堂内的语言形式教学探讨——国外研究新发展[J].当代教育科学.2005,(12)
26. 黄和斌等, 外语教学理论与实践[M].南京:译林出版社,2001