A Study Of Context-based English Reading Teaching In Independent College

Context was first put forward by Malinowski in1923, he argues that utterances and situation are bound up inextricably with each other and the context of situation is indispensable for the understanding of words. In fact, a correct understanding of the deep meaning of language is next to impossible without taking contextual factors into account. Context actually serves as the basis for the proper comprehension of language and is particularly of vital importance to clear understanding of internal meaning of language, since people always express their particular inner feelings by using utterances under different circumstances or certain cultural backgrounds.With the constant deepening of English teaching and research, growing importance has been highlighted in contextual teaching of language acquisition, which focused by more and more educators, and numerous teachers are trying to probing some new and effective teaching method in practice. The thesis elaborates on the role of linguistic context and non-linguistic context in reading comprehension. With the support of such contextual knowledge, readers can in a relatively easy way resolve different kinds of problems occurred in the course of English reading comprehension. The purpose of the thesis is to help students better understand English reading materials and to improve English reading comprehension so that overall comprehension of materials can be achieved.On the basis of the theory and research on the domestic and foreign words and context teaching, this thesis puts forward the context based reading teaching method (also called contextual teaching in reading), aiming to the existing issues in the current teaching process. This method refers to leading students to guess and comprehend the meaning of whole passage by analyzing the sentence structure and context in real text. According to the theories and researches on reading and context, this teaching strategy is supposed to transferring the way of understanding text from mechanically to associatively and also be efficaciously on spurring the students’interests in learning reading, enhancing their comprehensive application capability of language.The literature study review was adopted in this paper, which investigates the relevant theories in the past and present contextual teaching methods, in addition, the experiment was implemented between two Construction Cost classes in the same grade in an independent college, from which collected valid data and information. Those two classes shared the same questionnaire and tests in pre-and after-test, which intents to gather their different answers. The pretest manifested no difference between those the targets, but after four months, vocabulary teaching based context was put into use in the experiment class whereas the traditional method was carried out in the control class in this trial, the posttest illustrated obvious distinction not only in vocabulary section but also other comprehensive sections. And the scores of the experiment class are higher than the control class no matter in reading or in synthesis. After the test, the data collected were analyzed with statistical techniques by using the software SPSS. The result of statistical analysis of a test proves that Context Theories can help students improve their comprehension accuracy and reading speed. What’s more, students have gained a lot from English reading and enjoyed a lot by grasping some reading skills. The conclusion drawn from it is that Context Theories can be used into the teaching of English reading. Therefore, it is suggested that students should realize the crucial roles of contexts in the teaching of English reading. To achieve it, they need to choose suitable teaching materials to strengthen their consciousness of different contexts.The result of this investigation states clearly that teaching reading based on contest can help students enlarge vocabulary; they can learn to recite and utilize the vocabulary by analyzing the word-building and the context, completely replace the old mechanical method in learning words. In this way, students feel less stress on comprehending text, they have more interests in learning English. After the test, many students alter their passive impression on English reading, facilitate their study strategies, enhance their deep comprehension in sentence meaning, and their integrated language capability was strengthened.