On The Feasibility Of Offering An Extensive Reading Course In Senior Middle School English Classes

With economic reform and open policy furthered and developed, English as a major means of transcultural intercourse is playing a more and more important part in international transaction, business trade and technical cooperation. However, the present English teaching of senior middle schools can' t meet the needs of quickening advancement of social economical and cultural development. Because of the limited input channels and input amount of related knowledge, the students are weak in cultural consciousness. So it is not surprising that they can' t use English fluently and properly in practical communication. In reading classes, large quantities of time are spent in explaining new words and drilling English grammar items over and over again. As a result, these students can neither meet the requirements of the college teaching nor those of future work.According to Chomsky' s Innatist Hypothesis (1965), a human was born with language acquisition device and language input can activate it and make it function. Krashen (1985) holds that only when input is comprehensible, will language acquisition happen. At the same time, Krashen points out that if the learner receives enough comprehensible language input, he can get necessary grammar. Therefore, the teacher needn' t teach language forms in the next stage in a special way and as long as the students receive, large amaunts of language input, he can get the-language forms automatically. That means that the teacher' s major duty is to make the students receive as much language input as possible. Krashen and Terrell (1983: 131) suggest that 'reading may also be a source of comprehensible' input in a second language' . Krashen (1989) also claims that reading skillsimprove according to the amount of reading done. As an effective way of language input, reading can be divided into two stages: the initial stage of decoding and the second stage of comprehension. As a matter of fact, the senior middle school students have gone beyond the first stage and will be ready to obtain message through reading widely. Extensive reading can perform the supplementing function to intensive reading. If a middle school student doesn' t read much, he will be trapped in the unfavorable circle. So extensive reading ought to be paid as much attention to as intensive reading. The senior middle school students badly need to begin extensive reading to develop their synthetic reading capacity.The senior English syllabus (2000) points out that reading ability is to be developed as priority and the new English course standard (2001) makes it clear that the amount of reading, except the textbook, needs to reach up to 360, 000 words. A recent survey of the reading condition shows that most of senior middle school students are poor in the amount of vocabulary, slow in reading, weak in cultural consciousness and low in interest in English lessons. Almost all of the students expect the teacher to instruct them how to read by themselves. Some students make suggestions about how to carry out extensive reading in the classroom and even describe the ideal extensive reading class in mind.Under this circumstance, the author suggests setting up extensive reading in the classroom to help students form reading habits and acquire reading skills. Depending on the new English course standard, the goals of extensive reading course should lie in (1) enlarging the range of vocabulary, (2) developing the reading ability, (3) consolidating the results of intensive reading, (4) arousing interest in reading, (5) forming the reading habit and (6) strengthening the cultural consciousness. In order to carry out the extensive reading course, the teacher should have the modern teaching ideas, such as the quality education, the student subject and the language communicative competence. Then, he needs suitable reading material to secure a successful process of extensive reading teaching. The extensive reading material ought to be roughly-tuned in language, authentic and comprehensible, fit for the cognitive level of the...