| Reading comprehension plays a significant role in English learning and teaching and it has gained a lot of attention of both the researchers and language teachers as always. However, effective and innovative reading instructions with the aim to improve students'comprehensive reading abilities have never been the mainstream of current teaching system. Especially in ESL/EFL context, traditional reading instruction still prevails. Therefore, many problems resulting from English reading comprehension have been undiscovered and thus remained unsolved, which hampers learners from developing more comprehensive English reading abilities.The present study combines both quantitative and qualitative approaches with the aim to investigate the general situation of college students'reading ability and enhancing their English reading abilities by conducting Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction.The subjects of the study are 111 freshmen from two L2 classes in Huazhong University of Science and Technology; one is the contrast class with 60 students, and the other is the experimental class which has 51 students. At the beginning of the semester, we conduct a pretest of reading comprehension covering different aspects of reading abilities with an inquiry of participants'personal information about their English reading level and reading habits and so on at the beginning of the test among these two classes. Then, a reading Training (Concept– Oriented Reading Instruction) has been conducted on the experimental class, which lasts for one semester. At the end of the semester, a post-test has been conducted among the same 111 students in order to check their progress on reading comprehension; Lastly, 10 students randomly chosen from those who've participated in the training are invited to join a brief interview so as to find out their own perceptions on reading comprehension, and attitudes towards Concept– Oriented Reading Instruction training.To get convincing research findings, several precise analyses have been made by using SPSS. On one hand, we make analyses on both internal reliability and construct validity of pretest and posttest to cross out those inappropriate items before conducting the tests among the two classes of students. On the other hand, we make an analysis of students'personal reading information of the two classes of students; and then, we conduct a 2-tailed samples t-test to compare results of the pre-test and the post-test of the students, in order to check whether they have made any improvements in reading ability through the use of Concept–Oriented Reading Instruction. All the data collected from the tests are analyzed by SPSS 17.0.By analyzing their personal reading information, we know that most college students are not confident and satisfied with their reading ability. Although most of them like English reading, they lack chances and strategies to improve their reading abilities. Moreover, results reflected from tests show that most of the college students in this study do not have big problems in reading ability of understanding the facts and details, and they generally have moderately good command of word attack, but many of them still need to enhance their inference ability in reading. Lastly, for the college students, summarizing is not the biggest obstacle that hinders their reading comprehension, but it as well as inference has much room for improvement, and much to our delight, we find that Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction approach has a positive influence on their reading comprehension improvement both in terms of inferring and summarizing.Therefore, we call for more emphasis to be put on conducting creative and effective reading comprehension training in College English classrooms in China in order to enhance reading ability of our students, and the systematic reading comprehension training by using Concept– Oriented Reading Instruction, for instance, can be adopted. |
