Application Of Interactive Reading Model To The English Reading Teaching In Vocational Colleges

Reading is a very important ability for students to cultivate in English study. Teachers'reading teaching has made great effort on how to develop students'reading efficiency. Thecurrent reading teaching in China mainly engaged in"grammar-translation"teaching mode andthe deficiency is obvious. Such as, the reading class is centered on the teachers who give thelinear"knowledge imparting"teaching process regarding the students as knowledge receivers,which totally ignores the students'activeness and impact the understanding of the text as a whole.In order to find better way to solve the problems, the author did a reform on the English readingteaching for a semester which aimed to test the effectiveness of"interactive reading"model inimproving the readers'reading ability and language proficiency."Interactive reading"model is based on the"bottom-up"and"top-down"model. Since1960s, many western linguists have put forward several valuable theories on reading:"bottom-up"reading model makes a general conclusion on the reading mode before 1960s, inwhich the reading process is thought as a linear process beginning with words and ending withcomprehension; pays little attention on the effect of the background knowledge. Goodman (1976)defined the reading process as"a psycholinguistic guess game", which was called"top-down"reading model by other scholars. This reading model over stresses the high-level stages and doesnot see much significance of the language ability. Based on the two models above, afterovercoming the deficiency of them, a more reasonable model—"interactive reading"model wasproposed firstly by Rumelhart (1977) and further developed by Rumelharet and others. Thismodel integrates the advantages of the first two models: not only emphasizes the importance ofthe language knowledge, the decoding process, but also emphasizes the importance of thebackground knowledge, which has been absorbed by many scholars and used in the experimentalteaching. This thesis mainly focuses on the theory of the"interactive-reading"model and thestudy of the implication of the model in reading teaching. Firstly, the weak points of the currentreading teaching mode are pointed out,and secondly the theoretical bases of the"interactivereading"model, the procedure of its formation and the its advantages compared with the"translation-grammar"teaching mode are introduced. Lastly, this model is applied in the practical reading teaching and the data is collected and analyzed. The conclusion is reached thatthe"interactive- reading"model is a more effective model in improving students'reading ability.The subjects of the study were from freshman non-English major students in ShandongVocational College of Industry. All of them are from the freshmen majoring in accounting, whowas admitted in 2008, ranging in age from 17 to 20 with the same teacher. The students aredivided into two groups during the experiment: one is the experimental class, the other one is thecontrol class and the"interactive-reading"model and"grammar-translation"teaching mode areapplied respectively in the two classes. Based on the understanding of the interactive theory, thereading teaching class has been divided into three stages in which the"bottom-up"approach and"top-down"approach are integrated combined to develop students'reading ability and improvetheir language proficiency. The part of application of the"interactive reading"model consists ofthe teacher's role and the students'role in this reading model, the procedure of the readingteaching and the reading techniques and strategies taught to the students. The techniquesintroduced are designed to help foreign language readers to become interactive readers and helpteachers to teach reading with"interactive reading"model. The techniques are divided into twogroups: some techniques are designed to teach students to make effective use of bottom-upprocessing mode: 1). Building and activating background knowledge. In the thesis, the writerintroduces Carrell summary on the common points of some method to activate backgroundknowledge, including The Language Experience Approach (LEA), Extending Concepts ThroughLanguage Activities (ECOLA), Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DRTA),Experience-Text-Relationship method (ETR), PreReading Plan (PReP),Survey-Question-Read-Recite-Review method (SQ3R). All the methods can be used atpre-reading stage and post-reading stage. 2). Predicting. In the thesis a typical practice designedby Grellet based on Moody's idea is introduced for developing students'reading technique topredict what will happen in the following part of the text. 3). Skimming and scanning. Thesetechniques can help students to speed up their reading speed by picking up the informationneeded. 4). Information transferring. By changing the abstract information to concreteinformation the students understand the content and the intention of the writer thoroughly. Andsome techniques are designed to teach students to make effective use of the top-down processingmode: There are altogether three techniques to be introduced in this approach. 1). Applications in word attacking. The students can identify words by word formation knowledge, Identify wordsby contextual clues, identify words according to background knowledge. 2). Applications at thesentence level. Two techniques are introduced in understanding the coherence between thesentences: identify the topic sentence, understanding signal words. 3). Application at theparagraph level. In this part, several ways of paragraph development are introduced to helpstudents understand the structure of text.The 16 week's experiment was divided into three stages. The first stage was pre-test stage inwhich two classes were picked out according to their assessment test to make sure that thestudents had the same English level before they were given special training in reading. Thesecond stage was the mid-test stage in which the teacher helped students in the experimentalclass build and activated the students'background knowledge and interactive reading strategiesand techniques were taught and a test was followed as the midterm test. In the control class the"grammar-translation"teaching mode was taught and no special reading techniques andstrategies were taught by the teacher. The third stage was called post-test stage in which a finalexamination was taken to check the result of the experiment. All the data of the three test wascollected and was processed with the SPSS (17.0) software. The result shows that after 16 weeksteaching in the"interactive reading"model the students'reading ability and their languageproficiency have improved. The hypothesis H0: The application of the"interactive reading"model will help the students improve their reading efficiency and their language proficiency inEFL. That is to say, the hypothesis the reading model has a positive correlation with EFL readingis confirmed. At last the writer concludes main findings in the whole study and gives a detail onthe pedagogical implication of the study on application the"interactive reading"model, thedifficulties of the teachers and students during the experiment, the limitations of the whole study,and the suggestions on the further study.