| Nowadays with the development of society and technology, it becomes more andmore important for people to get various kinds of information they need throughreading. Therefore, reading has become more significant than ever before. Reading isthe main receptive skill, which is undoubtedly regarded as one of the most importantlanguage skills in English learning and teaching. A student’s achievement in the studyand his future success of career depend in large part on his reading ability. It isnecessary to study the factors that affect students’ reading comprehension in order tohelp them to improve their reading ability.The research is based on the theories of word formation, schemata and readingpsychology, and aims to explore the teaching of reading in senior high middle school.In English teaching, teachers usually pay more attention to linguistic schema andemphasize the importance of vocabulary and grammar in reading. Some of them evenignore the students’ guessing strategies and seldom guide students to practice theirguessing skills in reading classes. Such a practice, as a result, often has negative effecton the development of students’ reading ability. This article also attempts to try a newreading teaching method, which is to attach more importance to the guessing words inEnglish reading. It reports a study of some student-centered reading class activitieswhich are based on developing the students’ thinking awareness, and it also reportshow guessing strategies can affect students’ reading comprehension. The study beginswith a questionnaire, interview and the pre-study reading test and continues with theanalyzing of some examples in the national entrance examination, the purpose ofwhich is to get to know how many skills the students have already obtained and toassess the participant’s English reading ability at the beginning of the experimentalstudy, so that the assessment results can be served to be the baseline data for a furtherresearch on those students’ ability of reading comprehension. The analysis of the questionnaire is used to provide a comprehensive assessmenton the students’ guessing strategies awareness in their reading. The analysis indicatesthat students’ weak ability in solving unknown words and the inadequate application ofguessing strategies result in their poor reading proficiency. After the application of thenew reading teaching method that is designed for the students, a post-study reading testis carried out. The scores are calculated and a comparison is made. The results showthat the new reading teaching approach is effective in enhancing the students’ overallreading proficiency and in improving their reading speed.In a word, the study reported in this article convincingly demonstrates the closerelationship between the students’ guessing strategies using awareness and theirreading comprehension. A more effective approach to promoting the students readingability through imparting them with sufficient thinking strategies in English class issuggested. In spite of all the limitations of the study, it has some implication forteaching reading. |
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