A Study On The Teaching Of English Reading From The Perspective Of Hypertext

With increasingly frequent development of globalization and international exchanges since the21stcentury. English as the most widely spoken language in the world has become a bridge of communicationwith people all over the world. For Chinese senior high school students, reading is considered as a greatchallenge. Teachers should help students to accept this challenge and finally to improve their readingability.The Ministry of Education in China announced and carried out English Curriculum Standards forSenior High Schools, which stipulates that the reading level of senior high school students should come upto the expected standard. The purpose of the reading comprehension in college entrance examination is tomeet the demand. Reading comprehension is one of the most important items in college entranceexamination, Senior high school teachers have paid much attention to it. How to improve students’ readingability has been a hot subject for senior high school teachers. One of the characteristics of readingcomprehension is that more and more reading materials contain a large amount of information in recentyears. In reality, however, in senior high schools, where time spent in learning English is limited,development of reading ability should be given priority. How to cultivate the students’ ability of readingcomprehension has long been the hot topic of English language teaching among instructors. Amonginnumerous researches on the teaching of English reading at home and abroad, most of them focus on thetraining of reading skills and technics, and pay little attention to the background knowledge, students’response to the text and how teachers use text.For the reasons stated above, this paper carries on a study on the teaching of English reading fromhypertextual perspective. The research questions of this article are presented below.(1) What are the major troubles with the teaching of English reading in senior high school?(2) Can the hypertext construction in reading help students to improve their ability of English readingcomprehension?(3) How do teachers help students create their own hypertexts and carry out them in the classroom?In order to answer the three research questions above, the author conduct this study to collect andanalyze questionnaires and attitude scales. It infers that some teachers overemphasize on knowledge while ignoring reading ability. Some teachers have little allowance for individual learner differences and knowlittle about students’ needs in reading. Many of them also ignore the principles behind the teaching ofreading. Hence the teaching effects can not meet both teacher and student expectations. It is lucky thathypertext explains reading comprehension in a special way: a text is waiting to be discovered by ablereaders, since their level of background knowledge and purposes of reading are different. Every studentdevelops somewhat different understanding of what a text ‘means’, as read the same text, and thus bringabout different results. The process of reading,“as we may think”, is the process of the hypertextconstruction on the current text. Thus understanding a text is an interactive process between the reader withhis prior knowledge, the writer with his notions in the text and the text. Therefore, the author states thatlower level of comprehension results from students who are not able to construct their own text. Asteachers, we should help students to construct their own text, and only in this way can we help to improvestudents’ reading comprehension ability.This thesis consists of six parts. The first chapter is the introduction of the thesis, mainly introducingthe research background, research motivation, research objectives and frame structure of it. The secondchapter is the literature review of this article, containing some studies of hypertext theory which waspreviously conducted at home and abroad. Some important terms related to the study are reviewedmeanwhile. The third chapter is the theoretical foundation of the thesis. Chapter Four presents the researchmethodology of the thesis, which includes the research questions, research objects, methods, proceduresand data collection. In the fifth chapter, the author analyzes the data and discusses the results of the study.This section is the central part of the study. Chapter Six draws a conclusion of this study. It presents themajor findings of the study, and indicates that teaching reading in hypertext construction can improvestudents’ reading ability, develops students’ good reading habits, positive attitude, motivation, confidenceas well as strategies for life-long learning along with cross-cultural knowledge, awareness and capabilities.It also provides some pedagogical implications, presents some suggestions for teachers’ teaching andstudents’ reading, and points out the limitation of the study, and put forward the prospect of further study inthe end.