Improving The Reading Teaching In Middle Schools By Means Of Multimedia

Reading is an important channel to acquire knowledge. Both as a principle way and an objective in English learning and teaching, reading can help students achieve language competence. However, the traditional intensive teaching has put too much effort and time on words, expressions and sentences rather than acquirement of the context and structure as a whole. Even worse, for lack of rich and various teaching means, the tedious"duck-stuffing"teaching mode has put an end to the students'interests and initiative. There is no doubt that the students'competence has declined. As a result, the most urgent task for the middle school teachers is how to enrich the teaching means and conceive a relative English teaching methodology corresponding to the features of acquisitive adolescence.During the Information Age, the wide application of multimedia net technology has opened up a brand new field for computer-assisted language learning (CALL). To probe into CALL, at Qingdao Yucai Middle School the author has done a case study of Grade 9, whose purpose is to examine the perceived benefits of computers in English reading course through an assessment of the appropriateness and the effectiveness of the courseware. The students are found to achieve and enjoy more in CALL. With the inspiring results, the author demonstrates that the CALL well-built on the constructivism theory will make the teaching system more reasonable and effective. Besides, the author further demonstrates how to improve the teaching of reading and enhance classroom efficiency by means of multimedia and the Internet through the questionnaire and experiment.During the research, four obstacles are found to have baffled the students'language learning. First, the unskilled reader perceives the text as a chain of isolated words; secondly, the traditional teaching mode is not interesting enough to arouse the students'interests; next, for lack of cultural background knowledge, it's difficult for students to further understand the passage; finally, as Confucian and Buddhist doctrines have rooted firmly on Chinese minds, the Chinese students are more likely...