An Empirical Study On College English Reading Teaching Based On Frame Semantics

With the development of globalization,international communication becomes much more frequent,which makes English,the most widely used language in the world,become more important.Reading,as the main input access of language learning,turns into the new focus of college English teaching and learning.However,there are still many problems in college reading teaching,for example,teachers are used to adopting traditional methods to teach reading,like Grammar Translation method,and students cannot improve their reading ability effectively even though they have mastered enough knowledge about vocabulary and grammar because of frame differences.Teachers are still the center of class rather than students,which cannot activate students' subjective initiative and enthusiasm.Based on the current situation of college reading teaching,this paper reviewed previous research results at home and abroad,and proposed a new reading teaching pattern based on frame semantics to help students build second language frame and verified its effect by teaching experiment,taking questionnaire and interview as complement.This paper tries to provide some beneficial suggestions and attempts for further study.This paper reports an empirical study of non-English majors,which mainly aims to verify whether the reading teaching method based on frame semantics can effectively improve college students' reading comprehension ability.At the same time,it also wants to testify if the teaching method based on frame semantics can improve the reading ability of students more effectively than the traditional teacher-centered reading teaching method.There are two research questions in this study:1)Can the reading teaching method based on frame semantics improve students' reading ability? Is the reading teaching method based on frame semantics effective for students with low,middle and high level of English proficiency? If not,for which level students is it suitable?2)Which one can improve students' reading level more efficiently,the reading teaching method based on frame semantics or the traditional reading teaching method?Two natural classes of 2017 from the Northwest A&F University participated in the trial.In the control group,the teacher took the traditional method,that is,the teacher-centered reading teaching method;in the experimental group the teacher adopted the teaching method based on Frame Semantics.The pretest results showed the initial level of reading ability inthe two classes.The post-test tested the reading ability of the two classes after the experiment.The same questionnaire tested before and after the experiment to show the changes of the attitude,reading strategies of students in experimental group.The interview investigated students' view on the advantages,disadvantages and suggestions for the teaching method based on frame semantics.The researcher adopted SPSS21.0 and excel to do statistical analysis on the collected data: 1)t-test for pretest and post-test,and 2)descriptive statistics on the frequency of responses to the questionnaire analysis.Through statistical analysis of experimental,questionnaire and interview results,the researcher drew several main conclusions as following:1)Reading teaching method based on frame semantics can significantly improve students' reading level;Although reading teaching methods based on frame semantics can improve the reading ability of students significantly,compared with high level students,the improvement of middle and low level students is more significant.2)Although traditional text reading teaching methods can effectively improve students reading ability,but the reading teaching method based on frame semantics can improve students' reading ability more significantly.3)Students prefers the reading teaching method which combines the traditional way and the reading teaching method based on frame semantics.Based on these conclusions,the researcher of present study suggests teachers should teaching students according to their aptitude,and help students build their second language frame in daily reading teaching.