A Study Of English Reading Rate And Reading Comprehension Across Three Tasks Among Chinese College Students

English reading plays a very important part in English teaching, because reading is the most effectiveway for students to get information and language input. Besides, it is also the basic means for students toimprove language competence and communicative abilities. As Nuttall’s widely cited comment states:“speed, enjoyment, and comprehension are closely linked with one another”. At abroad, numerous studieshave been researched reading rate and reading comprehension, while at home, mere studies research therelationship between reading rate and comprehension. Many studies start from reading rate with teachingmethods and reading comprehension with learning strategies. Therefore, the thesis will carry on thecomprehensive research of reading rate and reading comprehension. Then, it will provide some suggestionsof English teaching.This paper, which is based on the schema theory and automaticity theory, analyzes the reading rate andreading comprehension and its relationship of English Major Group and Non-English Major Group studentsaccording to Carver’s three of reading tasks (rauding, learning and memorizing). This study proposes threefollowing questions:(1) Are there any differences in reading rates of the three tasks among Chinese college students(English Major vs. Non-English Major)?(2) Are there any differences in reading comprehension of the three tasks among Chinese collegestudents (English Major vs. Non-English Major)?(3) Is there any relationship between reading rate and reading comprehension among Chinese collegestudents (English Major vs. Non-English Major)?The subjects are80college students, among which40are majoring in English and should pass TEM-4and40are majoring in economics and should pass CET-6. At the beginning of the experiment, all studentscomplete three reading comprehension passages as a proficiency test. By using Independent-Samples TTest, the results indicate that there is no significant difference among two groups. It also means that thesestudents have same language proficiency. Thereby, two types of passages are adopted to test their readingrate and reading comprehension. The passages consist of6short expository texts and one type is ordinarypassages and the other type is economy. Finally, the data collected in the test are analyzing with SPSS andthe results are:(1) with regard to the reading rate, there is a significant difference between the EnglishMajor Group and the Non-English Major Group. With the increasing difficulty of three tasks, in the passage type1, English Major students have a higher rates than Non-English Major students; while in the passagetype2, English Major students have a lower rates than Non-English Major students, with the exception ofthe opposite results of task1;(2) with regard to the reading comprehension, there is a significant differencebetween the English Major Group and the Non-English Major Group. With the changing of the tasks, in thepassage type1, English Major students have a higher comprehending than Non-English Major students;while in the passage type2, English Major students have a lower comprehending than Non-English Majorstudents with the exception of task3, that is, English Major students scored higher than Non-English Majorstudents, with the exception of the subtle difference of task3;(3) in the task1, the correlation coefficient ofreading rate and reading comprehension in the passage type1is moderate positive (r=.262*) and in thepassage type2is negative (r=-.178); in the task2, the correlations in the passage type1and2are bothmoderate positive (r=.361**, r=.293**); and in the task3, the correlations in the passage type1is moderatepositive (r=.363**) and in the passage type2is zero correlation.Above all, this paper gives some suggestions for future English teaching. Non-English major studentsshould reinforce their reading and writing abilities and also improve their integrated skills. As to Englishmajor students, they should broaden their vision and enlarge their knowledge range. At the same time, it isexpected that other researchers could do further study based on this thesis.