A Study Of The Teaching Methods Of English Majors’ Reading: From The Cognitive Perspective

Reading is one of the basic skills which foreign language learners must master,so reading teaching plays a critical role in foreign language teaching, accordingly, themethodology of reading teaching is very important. Traditional English readingteaching is regarded as a course mainly for teaching vocabulary, grammar and thestructure of the text. And the instructors put their focus more on explaining themeanings of new words, the related grammars and the structures of the sentences.While the students are only the passive receivers, they just need to remember whathave been taught mechanically. The traditional method has caused a lot of problems.In this thesis, the author conducts a study of the teaching methods of English majors’reading from the cognitive perspective, and tries to prove the feasibility and necessityof this methodology. The author first introduces the cognitive theory, and relatedknowledge about reading, then explores the factors that affect reading and readingteaching, and finds out that the cognitive factors are the main factors. Therefore it isnecessary to apply the cognitive teaching methodology of reading in the readingteaching. This teaching method aims to establish a student-centered English readingteaching mode and improve students’ reading ability, under this method, theinstructors should know learners’ cognitive levels to design proper plan for theirteaching program and to choose the most appropriate materials，and the students’affective factors are also need to be considered by the instructors. They are also askedto direct students to apply proper strategies in the process of reading.This study takes24first-year students majoring English as the subjects to investigate whether the method is effective or not. And the research methods areclassroom observation, questionnaire and interview. Findings of this studydemonstrate that cognitive teaching methodology of reading is beneficial to improvestudents’ reading comprehension and the factors that play key roles in the cognitiveteaching methods and the characteristics of the teaching method are abstracted.