Obstacles And Countermeasures In English Reading Comprehension For Grade Three Students In Junior School

The new National Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standard requires the students to master the four basic skills---listening,speaking,reading and writing,and give an explicit description of reading.Reading is not only one of the important ways to acquire knowledge,but also the important task of English teaching.As an important skill,reading plays a very important role in English learning.Therefore,the reading comprehension test in Weifang Junior High School Proficiency Test is aimed to test students' comprehensive ability and test the ability of analyzing and solving practical problems in English.Fair to say,there is a certain gap between the students' reading level and the required standard of English Curriculum.When doing the reading comprehension questions students meet various obstacles.In order to find out the obstacles and to better the teaching of English reading,the author does some surveys and finishes the thesis.First,a reading obstacle questionnaire is made.It involves many aspects,such as reading habits,students' reading motivation,ways to deal with new words in reading,reading class preparation,the students' reading difficulties,the main factors that mainly affect the students' reading and various obstacles students may encounter in the process of reading.Two groups of students are chosen to be the subjects.The experimental class includes 93 students from the author's classes in Grade Three and the control class includes 50 students from the author's colleague's class.All data are collected and analyzed in order to find out what kinds of obstacles there are in English reading process.The results of the questionnaire show that there are six types of reading comprehension obstacles,namely lexical obstacles,grammar obstacles,discourse obstacles,skill obstacles,psychological obstacles and cultural obstacles.Among them,the biggest one is the lexical obstacle.The reading comprehension test in Weifang Junior High School Proficiency Test in 2015 is used as the first reading test and all the students' test results are collected.After analysis of the causes for the high-error-rate question items,it is found that the error rate is high and the errors mainly concentrate in vocabulary,grammar,discourse,reading skills,psychological effects and culture,which further confirms the results of the questionnaire.The causes of reading barriers in Grade Three students' reading comprehension come from four main aspects: teachers' teaching method,students,teaching materials and class organization.For each obstacle in the students' reading comprehension,different countermeasures are taken by the author to help the students to get over the obstacles and improve their reading.To clear away lexical obstacles,teachers should help the students remember English words and enlarge their vocabulary.Help them learn,use and consolidate grammar knowledge in practice.For discourse obstacles,ways should be thought out to understand the structure of the article.The reading guidance should be strengthened and the students' knowledge of language and culture should also be enriched.A large amount of reading exercises should be put into students' daily English study.After about one school year,the reading comprehension test in Weifang Junior High School Proficiency Test in 2016 is chosen to be the second reading test.The students of experimental class and control class are tested again and all the reading test results are collected.Compared with the control class,the result and analysis of the scores of students in the experimental class shows that their levels of English reading comprehension have improved after the reading training.To sum up,the study shows that there are six reading obstacles in the English reading comprehension of the students in Grade Three.Above all,vocabulary obstacles have the greatest influence on the students' reading.Therefore,in order to effectively improve students' English reading,the primary task is to help students to enlarge their vocabulary.The causes of the obstacles are analyzed and different countermeasures are developed to help students to clear the reading obstacles.It is good for English teachers to come up with corresponding countermeasures to clear away the students' reading obstacles.These countermeasures include: helping the students memorizing English words and enlarging their vocabulary;consolidating the grammar knowledge in practice;helping the students understand the English structure;providing more reading skills,overcoming the students' psychological fear and enriching the students' cultural knowledge.The purpose of this thesis is to explore various methods to help students to clear the reading comprehension obstacles,to improve students' English reading comprehension and to develop good reading habits that can benefit students in their whole life.