Study Of English Newspaper-reading Teaching In Senior Middle School

Reading is a receptive language process and is often the chief goal of learners in countries where English is taught as a foreign language. It is the purpose and also the most important means of language learning. Reading teaching is considered to be one of the most important teaching processes in senior middle school English teaching. Most of the teachers have gained lots of experience on how to teach textbooks. But we should say that it is not enough only to depend on the students' textbooks, which cannot meet the need of the development of the language. Its reading materials are not fresh enough without a great reading amount, which limits the students' reading ability indeed.So material selection has long been one of the most controversial problems in reading teaching. Although an agreement on this problem is hard to reach, one point has so far been commonly accepted that reading materials should provide readers with sufficient new and useful information relevant to their reading goals. Currently available reading textbooks are undoubtedly well designed to present all kinds of authentic materials, yet some disadvantages still- exist. So, many teachers have brought English newspapers into their English-teaching classroom. English-newspapers have many good aspects, such as interesting stories, vivid words and expressions and so, on. Students, can broaden their vocabulary, enrich their reading experience, stimulate their reading interest by enjoying reading English newspapers. It is well known that the view of reading is essentially concerned with meaning, specifically with the transfer of meaning from mind to mind: the transfer of a message from writer to reader. In fact reading comprehension is an interaction between the reader and the text. The students do not read materials word for word, but use lots of reading skills and strategies, even use their background information, linguistic knowledge and so on. Therefore, teachers must master some knowledge of psychology, second language teaching or reading comprehension strategies.In this paper, we will focus on the study of material selection problem based on the analysis of the first hand data collected through close observation of learner readers' performances in the extensive reading activities, their various attitudes towards texts included in the currently available reading textbooks, and data collected from an open survey as well as a controlled survey of learner readers' reading preference.The paper is divided into four chapters. Chapter One and Two explain, analyze the basic knowledge and the theory of reading comprehension and present researches about this subject. Chapter Three is about the advantages and the disadvantages of newspaper articles. The last chapter refers to introducing an experiment on using "English Weekly" as a supplementary reading material in Senior Middle School English teaching classes. This chapter begins with an account of a controlled survey of learner readers' preference, which is conducted to test the feasibility of using current popular newspaper articles for teaching reading. There is also a test between classes using newspaper and the ones not using it, showing the good effects of using newspaper as extensive reading material.Conclusion is reached on the basis of the above expounding and analysis that current popular newspaper articles motivate students better than other materials because of its simplicity of vocabulary and poise of sentences. Apart from this, newspapers can also provide sufficient amount of reading passages rich in updated, interesting and useful information to help improve students' comprehension of materials on various topics.