The Effect Of Provider And Activator On Vocational College Students' Reading Comprehension

Reading is an essential and important skill for students of English as a foreign language, and it is basic to the development of listening, speaking, writing and translating for students. However, after teaching for several years in a vocational college, the author is still frustrated with the students'poor performance in reading. How to effectively teach reading to improve students'English reading competence has long been the focus of English teachers in China. Currently, the prevailing perspective toward the analysis of reading process is the schema theory.The schema theory originated in the psychological field in the 1930s, and later was applied to the study of human intelligence and discourse analysis. The schema theory of reading explained the function of the readers'background knowledge in language comprehension. The fundamental assumption of the theory is that a text does not carry meaning by itself and it only provides directions for the reader on how he should reconstruct meaning from his prior knowledge.On the basis of the schema theory of reading, Ausubel first raised the theory of advance organizer in the early 1960s, suggesting that readers should be provided with needed background knowledge in its verbal form before reading. According to the roles it played in reading, researchers later classified it into two main types: the provider and the activator. The provider is to provide new schemata and the activator is to activate prior schemata before reading. Some researches have proved the feasibility of utilizing advance organizer in the teaching of reading but few researchers study the provider and the activator respectively and compare the effect of them on reading comprehension and few researches have been carried out on the effect of provider and activator on vocational college students'English reading comprehension. In such circumstances, the author attempts to conduct an experiment to respectively examine the effect of provider and that of activator on reading comprehension of vocational college students who learn English as a foreign language. The author intends to address the following four questions:1) Are both provider and activator effective in vocational college students'English reading comprehension?2) Is the effect of provider more effective than that of activator?3) Is the effect of provider and activator more effective than that of language proficiency in vocational college students'English reading comprehension?4) Is there any gender-based difference in the influence of provider and activator on students'reading comprehension?These questions were mainly examined in both quantitative and qualitative study. Fifty-six non-English major freshmen from Laiwu Vocational College participated in this experiment.First, the author took cluster sampling to randomly choose 27 students in Class One who constituted the experimental group and 29 students in Class Two who comprised the control group. Based on their scores in pre-test, all the 56 subjects were divided into a high proficiency group and a low proficiency group, and of all the 56 subjects, there were 24 male students and 32 female students, naturally we had a male group and a female group in the current experiment.Secondly, considering the need of provider, the author chose Passage A as the test material to conduct a provider test. In the provider test, provider was given to the experimental group but not to the control group. After the subjects finished the test, the papers were collected and scored for further analysis.Thirdly, according to the requirement of activator, the author chose Passage B as the material to design activator test. Similarly, activator was given to the experimental group but not to the control group. As the author did in the provider test, after the subjects completed the test, the papers were collected and scored for further analysis.Fourthly, in order to get the feedback from subjects, the author held an interview with some students from experimental group.In answer to the above four questions, Frequencies, T-test and Analysis of Variance were conducted by using SPSS 10.0.The results show that both provider and activator have positive influences on enhancing vocational college students'reading performance to some extent. Compared with provider, the effect of activator is more pronounced and reaches the level of significance. Even though the effect of provider does not reach the statistically significant level, it is more pronounced on female students than male ones and the effect is significant. Although provider and activator can facilitate students'reading comprehension, it is language proficiency that is the main factor which influences vocational college students'reading comprehension. These results have proved that both provider and activator do exert positive influences on improving students'reading, and the written form of provider and activator is monotonous.The previous researches seldom explored the effect of provider and activator on English reading comprehension separately and few researches on vocational college students'reading comprehension. Therefore, this research is an attempt in the domain of the teaching of vocational college students'reading, which will further develop and perfect the theory of advance organizer, and brings some implications and suggestions which will be illuminating to the teaching and learning of vocational college students'reading comprehension.