A Study Of The Textual Practice And Development Of Reading Ability And Technique

"Reading makes a full man and writing an exact man" (Francis Bacon). Reading is important for students and a great deal of school reading seems to be informational. Reading, for almost all the students, is a learning tool in science, social studies, language arts, mathematics and so forth so that it is the royal road to knowledge. Any review of the literature on the teaching of reading techniques to EFL students has to include the seemingly infallible aphorism that reading is an interactive and interpretive process (Williamson, 1988: 7). No text can be considered separate from the reader; there must be a successful interaction between the reader and the texture to be processed. As John (1986) has stated, the degree to which the meaning and structure of a text are made apparent to the reader depends largely on whether the reader-selected schemata, or expectations, are consistent with the text. Reading, according to Widdowson (1979: 174), is "an interaction between the reader and the writer," which cannot be done without an insight into the texture of the target language.Therefore, the purposes of the research are: (1) to develop the senior students' reading ability and technique by reinforcing the texture practice in reading materials; (2) to train the Senior teachers of English to teach and instruct English reading effectively on constructing the texture in and out of class; (3) to lay a firm foundation for their further study.The issue of the thesis is that students' English reading ability and technique would be developed by enforcing textual reading practice. And the methods that are used in the experiment are the processing methods ?in which the emphasis is on the process of reading - the generation of ideas and development of logical and effective presentation - with considerable time and attention spent on peer review and feedback. The thesis consists of six parts. Part one starts with a brief introduction to the purpose and significance of the study, followed by the explanations of the "texture" and the "text" and some other relative terms involved. Part two presents the recent studies at home and abroad on texture and reading. In part three, we mainly introduce the reading theories of top-down process, bottom-up process and analysis-by -synthesis model. The forth part of the thesis provides some information of subjects, procedure and scale, as well as data collection and data analysis, etc. Part five discusses the results of the data analysis. Part six includes the conclusions and implication of the research as well as the suggestionsfor further research, limitations of the study are also presented in this part.Thus the present thesis is an experimental study of the texture and reading comprehension with Chinese learners of English as subjects. Data on independent variable texture and dependent variable EFL reading ability and technique are collected and carefully analyzed. The results indicated that the students of English needed to reinforce the texture practice. The understanding of the texture is tightly and positively related to their reading ability and technique.