the-analysis-of-reading-barriers-in-english-major-and-the-countermeasures英语论文-毕业论文.doc

Abstract
The thesis aims to highlight the important role that reading plays in the university English study. University English reading is an effective approach to enlarging vocabulary, strengthening language knowledge, enriching expressing skills and improving expressing quality. In practice, listening and speaking are important, however, without reading, it is impossible to improve oral expressing quality, nor achieve the goal of writing and translating.
The thesis adopted a questionnaire, 80 university English major were participated in the investigation. The analysis of results was performed in the form of tables and a column chart.
Finally, from the questionnaire that has been carried out, analyze the statistics and summarize some countermeasures, stimulant students’ interests, cultivate students’ reading skills, input foreign culture and give them some reading strategies to solve the problem. It aims to help students develop good reading habits and improve their reading ability.

Key words：English major English reading Influential factors Countermeasures

摘要
本文的目的是为了进一步强调英语阅读在大学生英语学习中的重要作用。
大学英语阅读既是扩大词汇的有效途径，也是巩固已有语言知识，丰富表达技巧，提高表达质量的有效途径。在实际中，听和说是重要的，但如果没有阅读，口语表达质量的提高就很难提高。就不可能有向写和译方面转化的质的飞跃。
本文采用了问卷调查的形式对80名英语专业的大学生进行了调查，调查结果分别用表格和柱形图进行了分析。
最后,从所调查的问卷，分别从激起学生兴趣、培养学生的阅读技巧、进行相应的外国文化输入以及对待不同文章的阅读策略方面总结了一些解决问题的对策，旨在帮助学生养成良好阅读习惯及提高阅读能力。

关键词：英语专业 英语阅读 影响因素 对策

Contents
Abstract …………………………………………………………...................................i
摘要……........................................................................................................................ii
Chapter One Introduction ……………………………………………………………..1
Chapter Two Literature Review……………………………………………………….3
2.1 The Definition of Reading………………………………………………………3
2.2 Factors Involved in English Reading…………………………………………...4
2.3Three Models of Reading………………………………………………………..5
2.3.1 bottom-up approach………………………………………………………...5
2.3.2 top-down approach…………………………………………………………6
2.3.3 interactive model…………………………………………………………...7
Chapter Three Research Methodology…………………………...................................8
3.1 Research Objective………………………………………………………….......8
3.2 Subjects…………………………………………………………………………8
3.3 Instrument…………………………………………………................................8
3.4 Procedure………………………………………………………………………9
Chapter Four Results and Countermeasures………………………………………....10
4.1 Results and Analysis from Questionnaire…………………………………….10
4.2 The Analysis of Influential Factors………………………...............................11
4.2.1 Linguistic factors……………………………………………………….12
4.2.2 Non-linguistic factors…………………………………………………..15
4.3Countermeasures…………………………………………………………….....17
4.3.1Reading strategies………………………………………………………….17
4.3.2Stimulating Students’ Interest……………………………………………...17
4.3.3Inputting culture…………………………………………………………...18
Chapter Five Conclusion…………………………………………..............................20
References………………………. ………………………………..............................21
Appendix I………………………. ………………………………………………….22
Appendix II………………………………………………………..............................23

The Analysis of Reading Barriers in English Major and the Countermeasures

Chapter One Introduction
With the development and improvement of international exchange，English has become an essential tool for communication among people from different nations and regions. The present study is a survey study which attempts to emphasize the importance of English reading in university students’ study and to know some difficulties they meet when they are reading .It aims to summarize proper methods and countermeasures to help students improve their English reading ability.80 English major students were participated in this survey in the form of responding to a questionnaire.
Reading is quite essential for language acquisition，especially in the environment of studying English as a foreign language. In present-day society，with the economic globalization，two-thirds of newspapers ,magazines and periodical spread in English all over the world. Therefore, English reading plays a very important role in college students’ acquisition of knowledge and analysis of English material increasingly. At present, reading is the major input of language, during the learning process of college students, among the four language skills—listening, speaking ,reading ,and writing, reading has accounted a lot. As Kristen(1985) said ,“reading is good for language acquisition; it promotes better spelling, better writing skills, higher reading
comprehension and more advanced vocabulary.”One’s reading ability is a major indication of his integrative language proficiency. But compared with a lot of theoretical research in English reading, survey studies are superior to theoretical ones.
Studies abroad，they are based on the design of good experiment to demonstrate the limitations of existing theories. It aims to revise and improve the existing theories (Inagaki S,2002). In contrary, studies at home, English reading research focused on schema theory to guide English reading and English teaching, application of reading strategies and theory basis, the mental process of reading and so on(Yi,2003). In general, studies at home were more inclined to the worship of existing models and theories, to apply them directly.
The present study is a survey study on the influential factors in college students’ English reading .With the help of a questionnaire, the present study attempts to find out the difficulties that college students always confront with in English reading and try to offer countermeasures to solve them.
The thesis consists of five chapters. This chapter is an introduction. Chapter Two is a literature review，which gives the definition of reading and countermeasures，methods of reading and some related studies. Chapter three presents the research method，research question and data collection. Chapter Four describes the results and analysis from the questionnaire as well as effective countermeasures. And Chapter Five is the last part of this study. It summarize the major findings，implications and also gives the recommendations for future studies.

Chapter Two Literature Review
This chapter contains three sections. The first section is about the definition of reading and second section is about factors involved in English reading and the last one is three models of reading.
2.1 The Definition of Reading
Authorities and experts on the teaching of reading have different views on what reading is. In general terms, reading involves the reader, the text, and the interaction between reader and text .According to Douglas(1981:82),the nature of silent reading is about the behavior of a reader. The text and the reader do not constitute actual reading. What constitutes actual reading is the interaction between the text and reader.
Francoise(1981:5) defined from the aspect of information ,“Understanding a written text means extracting the required information from it as efficiently as possible. ”This means reading is a comprehensive process Wilga(1987:187) describes a similar idea that reading is a complex, actively thinking psychological activity, which is not a passive, but rather an active process. Reading is also a completely individual activity. It is the mental activities that readers focus on in order to construct his meaning and understanding from a text.
However, Nuttal(1982:222) disagreed that reading necessarily involved understanding:“reading is the identification of linguistic forms from strings of written configuration that present them, as evidenced by producing the conventional signs for the same linguistic form in some other system of representation.”
Although there are different views about a precise definition of reading, the most useful and practical one to today’s English reading is not only an active process, but also a comprehensive process. In English reading, find weakness and try to close the gap.
2.2 Factors Involved in English reading
Students often have difficulties in improving their reading ability. These difficulties not only result from their method of learning, but mostly from their lack of basic knowledge about sentence structures, parts of speech, tense, voice, and non-predicting verbs and so on. Also they are lacking of vocabulary and some background knowledge of the English- speaking countries. In view of Krash(1985:103), three sub-factors need to be taken account into their part to promote reading competence. They are adequate vocabulary, ability to speculate on lexical meanings and awareness of lexical deviations. Vocabulary serves as the most preliminary foundation for English reading comprehension. But only few students admit that they have adequate vocabulary to fulfill their understanding.
Grammar roles and sentence patterns are also fundamental elements in English reading. Because of the grammar confusion, students often do not understand the reading material although they know all the words. If the students are unable to distinguish the main clause from a subordinate clause and are unable to know their relationships, despite understanding the meaning of every word in the sentence, understanding is unlikely to occur with accuracy.
Language is rather like a mirror that reflects the national culture of its speaker.
The American linguist Sapir thinks the language cannot exist without culture. Culture can be explained as what the society does and thinks, and the language is the expression the ideas of society. Obviously, culture is one of the keys in English reading. Therefore, confronted with cultural differences，readers should be given the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the target culture.
Mother tongue is a double edged sword, on the one hand, reading habits and reading experiences of the mother tongue may facilitate English reading. On the other hand, the native patterns and culture may hinder the process of English reading to some extent.
2.3 Three Models of Reading
This part will discuss three models of reading: bottom-up approach, top-down approach and interactive model.
2.3.1Bottom-up Approach
Until now, the bottom-up approach leads both first and second language research and theory. According to Cambourne(1979), bottom-up approach was the basis of the overwhelming majority of reading schemes. The bottom-up approach regard reading as a process of decoding written symbols into their aural equivalents in a linear fashion. Cambourne(1979) uses the following illustration of how the process is supposed to work: printàevery letterà phonemes and blendingàpronunciationà meaning.
Thus, one first distinguishes each letter as it is encountered, Sounds these out, matches the written symbols with their aural equivalents blends these together to form words, and derives meaning. The derivation of meaning is thus the final procedure in which the language is translated from one of symbolic representation to another .In the early stage of reading it would be a reasonable explanation of reading process to teach learners the sound-symbol correspondences and, actually, this is the most popular approach to teaching reading—the phonics approach，in which learners are taught to decode words by matching written symbols with their aural equivalents. However, there are a crowd of critics about this approach because it emphasizes meaning in the process. Evidence against the notion that reading is a matter of decoding letters to sounds in a linear way also came from work carried out in the 1970s by researchers with a technique miscue analysis. The technique pioneered by Goodman and Burke(1972), contains the analysis of errors made by the reader when reading the text loudly. It shows that reading is more than mechanical decoding. Those readers who are reading for meaning generate miscue that makes sense semantically.
2.3.2 Top-Down Approach
Insights from sources are mentioned above results in the postulation of alternative to the bottom-up, phonics approach. This has been known as the top-down or psycholinguistic approach to reading. According to the view，one begins with a series of hypothesis or predictions about the meaning of the text, which one is about to read ,and then selectively samples the text to determine whether or not the predictions are correct. Top-down processing has been used to represent that reading is a process of reconstructing meaning rather than decoding form, and readers only resort to decode if other meaning fail. Cambourne(1979) gives the following schematization of the approach: past experience, languageà selective aspectsàmeaningàsound, pronunciation.
From what I have discussed, readers can understand that this approach emphasizes the reconstruction of meaning rather than the decoding of form. The interaction of reading and the text is the core to the process, instead of decoding each symbol, or even every word.
2.3.3 Interactive Model
Interactive model is one of the newest outcomes of modern reading theories. It adopts the two traditional models’ (bottom-up &top-down) strong points while overcoming their weak points. The interactive model is a kind of compromise theory between the two and it agrees with the function of both lower level and higher level processes to reading comprehension .Therefore it has become a more perfect reading model. While reading, students begin to interact with the author of the text and try to understand and perceive the author’s real purpose and meaning as much and as quickly as possible.

Chapter Three Research Methodology
This chapter is composed of four parts. With an intention to summarize troubles in college students’ English reading through the investigation, a questionnaire was adopted. The first part is research objective and the next part is subjects, instrument is the third part and the last part is procedure.
3.1 Research Objective
In order to investigate the obstacles and difficulties in university students’ English reading, the survey was adopted. It aims to improve their reading ability and stimulate their interest as well as cultivate their reading skills through the analysis of influential factors.
3.2 Subjects
The subjects participated in the study are 80 students from Jiangsu Normal University Kewen college junior and senior English major. There are 71 girls and 9 boys. The ages of them are similar. It covers different English level students, they almost pass CET4, 80 percent of them pass CET6, 39 percent of them pass TEM4.
3.3Instrument
The questionnaire was addressed to the subjects. The questionnaire (see Appendix I) is intended to find what kinds of matters and difficulties when college students are reading. Students’ attitudes toward those questions can be divided into five kinds, strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor d