What are the obstacles to middle school students' English reading?

How to cultivate and train middle school students' English reading ability? This paper analyzes how to eliminate students' reading barriers, and points out that middle school students have psychological barriers, vocabulary barriers, grammar barriers, discourse barriers, skill barriers and cultural barriers in reading. Only by helping students overcome these obstacles can teachers really improve their reading ability.

Keywords middle school students; English reading; Obstacles; Countermeasures

In the teaching of English reading in middle schools, the author finds that students have psychological barriers, vocabulary barriers, grammar barriers, discourse barriers, skill barriers and cultural barriers in reading. In this regard, the author puts forward several solutions, hoping to help improve students' reading ability.

First, psychological barriers and countermeasures

Psychologists tell us that when people are in a state of tension and anxiety when reading, they are prone to fear and their reading comprehension ability cannot be exerted normally. Many students lack self-confidence, are eager for success and lack patience when reading. These unhealthy reading psychology objectively limits the development of students' reading ability.

Countermeasures: pay attention to the cultivation of non-linguistic factors and stimulate students' reading interest.

Teachers should not only impart English knowledge, but also pay attention to students' reading psychology, eliminate their impatience, fear, anger and other negative emotional experiences, and eliminate interference. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to give some psychological education and guidance to students. In addition, interest is motivation, just as Piaget, a psychologist, said, interest is an energy regulator, and its participation can produce the power to store the heart. Junior high school students are at the age of youth development and have a strong thirst for knowledge. In order to meet their requirements, teachers must pay attention to the interesting materials when selecting materials, and try to avoid the single theme and boring content of the article. Teachers can download some jokes or humorous stories from the Internet, and also classify the reading materials to enhance students' reading interest, thus cultivating students' good reading psychology. For example, teachers can use English textbooks to classify interesting reading texts, which can be roughly divided into writing people, taking notes, scientific articles and fables. Writing articles about characters is generally about their hobbies, characteristics, personal growth experiences and outstanding contributions; A chronicle article explains the time, place, people and events; Fable stories are interesting; Scientific articles are boring, but the teacher can explain the characteristics of the articles clearly to the students. This kind of article uses a series of data and survey results to illustrate the characteristics of the problem. Let students know the types of articles and master the characteristics of articles, which will greatly improve students' reading comprehension ability and speed, let students experience success and stimulate their reading interest.

Second, vocabulary barriers and countermeasures

Lexical barriers are mainly reflected in the following aspects: adding Chinese new words to reading materials. The survey shows that these words also interfere with students' actual reading. Especially in long materials, when the word appears below again, students will mistake it for a new word. In addition, the derivatives of such words are not treated as new words in later materials; There are many such words in the reading materials, which are derivatives of the vocabulary learned; Cooked words have new meanings, which are completely different from the meanings that students have mastered, but they are actually new words; Curriculum standards allow reading about 3% of new words in the material.

Countermeasures: Maximize students' vocabulary.

Length increases vocabulary through word formation

Most of the existing English words are formed by word formation. Teachers can introduce students to three common word-formation methods in English: transformation, synthesis and derivation. Through classification and comparison, especially let students master the meaning and usage of the most commonly used prefixes and suffixes, and let them "guess" its derivatives and their parts of speech from known words, thus consolidating and expanding their vocabulary.

2. Guess the meaning of new words through the information given in the article. In general, the questioner will give corresponding hints to the new words in the text, so that students can guess the meaning through the context. For example:

1 Guess the meaning of words through synonyms or antonyms in the article. For example, influence is sometimes called flu or a bad cold. According to the context, influence is synonymous with a bad cold, meaning "flu"; Most dentists' offices are boring places, but Emilion's new office is a bright and pleasant place. As can be guessed from the context, monotony is the antonym of cheerful or bright, meaning "lifeless and gloomy".

② Guess the meaning of new words according to grammatical structure and punctuation. For example, scientists who study inserts are called entomologists.

③ Guess the meaning of new words according to common sense. For example, the Olympic Games should be held in a good mental state. Our philosophy is to participate rather than win. Judging from common sense, participation means "participation" and "participation". Because "the Olympic Games advocates a good competitive spirit, and its purpose is to participate rather than win or lose". )

3. Read widely and enlarge your vocabulary

Ask students to remember this sentence: "To build a strong vocal music, you need to read well." Extensive reading can not only enable students to repeat and master the vocabulary they have learned, but more importantly, it can enable students to get in touch with new words and acquire new knowledge, which is an effective way to expand their vocabulary. Reading materials (bibliography) can be recommended by teachers and selected by students. These materials should be sufficient, authentic and novel, and have a wide range of topics to meet students' respective reading interests. In the process of reading, teachers should guide students to pay attention to those recurring keywords, fixed collocations and sentence patterns, and extract new words or sentence patterns that interest them; Students should be encouraged to use reading notes and other forms to consolidate. Carrying out some interesting vocabulary association activities in teaching can stimulate students' interest and achieve the purpose of consolidating and deepening their impressions. For example, students can say (or write) a series of words continuously according to the first and last letters of words, and compared with each other, the words are much new. This kind of "one-stop word" is usually developed according to the first and last letters, such as: worker → rewrite → mail → latest → tough → harvest → ..., or it can be developed according to two letters, such as: rewrite → telegram → photo → total → alone → neat → attention → ...

3. Grammatical obstacles and countermeasures

Looking at the reading materials of senior high school entrance examination in recent years, it is not difficult to find a remarkable feature: the language of the reading materials is authentic and fluent, the grammatical structure is complex, complex sentences, ellipsis sentences and inverted sentences are widely used, the language expression is rich, and the implied information is widely distributed. Even if the examinee understands the superficial words, it is impossible to understand the meaning of the text quickly and answer the questions accurately if he lacks profound grammar skills.

Countermeasures: Consolidate students' basic grammar knowledge and lay a good foundation for reading. Grammar knowledge plays an important auxiliary role in reading. Mastering some grammar knowledge can help students correctly analyze sentences, find out the relationship between parts and accurately understand the meaning of some long and difficult sentences. Teachers should consciously guide students to find out the backbone of sentences, that is, the subject and predicate of sentences, with the help of grammatical analysis; Find out the modifier of the sentence, that is, the attribute, adverbial and complement of the sentence, so that students can solve the difficult sentence as if they were confused by a cow. At the same time, the author thinks that it is impossible to analyze grammar knowledge in detail here. We should make students consciously use grammar as a means of reading and really make use of grammaticalization to make boring fun.

Fourth, discourse barriers and countermeasures

Discourse obstacles are as follows: poor inductive ability. Many students can understand a single sentence, but they can't summarize the center of the article, the author's ideas and writing clues, and they can't grasp the article as a whole. Weak reasoning ability. Sticking to the superficial appearance of the article, it is impossible to make effective reasoning on many related statement points in order to try to figure out the author's true intention and grasp the deep meaning of the article; Lack of sensory ability. I can't feel the author's voice and find the beauty behind the article.

Countermeasures: pay attention to discourse analysis and strengthen students' discourse awareness. To eliminate the discourse barrier in students' reading, we must first analyze the reasons for its formation. For a long time, in English teaching, the dominant teachers often pay too much attention to the teaching of grammar knowledge and adopt the grammar-oriented teaching mode from part to whole and from top to bottom, which is not only not conducive to the cultivation of students' discourse analysis ability, but also leads to students' inability to grasp the semantic relationship between paragraphs and the whole discourse, and the knowledge they have mastered cannot be implemented and consolidated because they are divorced from the vivid and real context. Therefore, when teaching texts and commenting on reading comprehension questions, teachers must emancipate their minds, guide students to start with text analysis, use known language knowledge, have an overall understanding of the whole article, and then analyze the main idea and theme of the paragraph. On this basis, putting the language difficulties in the materials into specific contexts for grammatical analysis can not only strengthen students' discourse and pragmatic awareness and discourse and pragmatic ability, but also enable students to master language knowledge more deeply.

1. Help students build discourse schema.

Schema plays a very important role in understanding the structure and even the content of an article. If it is a linear structure, we should pay attention to the temporal and spatial order, main plot and development of this paper; If it is a hierarchical structure, it can guide students to find topic sentences, sub-topic sentences and facts used to support the theme. Teachers should try to use some intuitive means, such as blackboard writing, projection, charts, tables and stick figures, to help students build more detailed semantic images, and then let students express the main plot and content of the article concisely in their own words according to the schema and keywords. Teachers can also ask students to draw the corresponding schema according to the content.

2. Topic discussion

In the current English textbooks, the mode of "one unit, one topic" is established when arranging unit teaching content. The first step of reading teaching should start with "warming up" around the topic of this unit. The forms of activities can be eclectic and colorful, such as: looking at pictures and talking, debating freely, seeing the small from the big, seeing the small from individuals, families, classes and schools, and going directly to the country and society. Topic discussion can not only stimulate students' learning interest and motivation, but also "soften" the "hard bones" in the teaching content of this unit, making the classroom learning atmosphere vigorous and energetic. The direction of topic discussion needs the teacher's careful design before class. Among them, the most important principle is to conform to the reality of students and discuss around the theme. As long as students are given enough imagination, they can express their views according to the knowledge and information they have learned. Through discussion, we can further understand the author's writing intention and viewpoint, and tap the highlights of the article.

Playing different roles

Depending on the content of reading, the teacher can ask the students to change the content of the article into a dialogue and then perform it, which will make the students feel immersive.

4. Writing consolidation after reading

Psychologists believe that writing is a kind of exercise that combines brain nerves and hand muscles. Further consolidating the acquired language information is of great help to students' memory training and thinking training. Teachers can flexibly design written exercises according to the content of the article, combined with the language form and language meaning, which can be dialogue fill in the blanks, dictation fill in the blanks, word fill in the blanks, and rewrite and continue writing according to the initial letter, abbreviation, and continuation of the text or a paragraph, so that students can flexibly use the language they have learned.

Five, skill barriers and countermeasures

The so-called skill barrier refers to the reading barrier caused by readers' bad reading habits or lack of correct text reading skills. For example, bad reading habits, such as word-for-word reading, some reading softly or with a pen tip, lack of the ability to directly accept text signals by visual sense. This kind of reading hinders the direct understanding of sentences and paragraphs, resulting in repeated reading, which will greatly reduce the quality and speed of reading; Lack of necessary text reading skills, including: how to guess the meaning of words, how to make grammatical analysis, how to identify the functions of various sentences and use logical subtext, how to find the context of the article, accurately find out and understand the details of the material, how to find out the topic sentences according to different text types, and judge the main idea.

Countermeasures: Pay attention to the cultivation of reading habits and skills. Students' exposure to English is mainly through reading. To improve the reading level, we should first cultivate students' good reading habits, and then master the necessary reading skills.

1. Efficiency first, limited reading.

Every time you read an article, you should limit your time and be efficient. Training students to carry out strict time-limited reading training requires students to scan and read quickly with their eyes and brains, with wide viewing range and short viewing time, and only grasp the main idea of the article without pursuing details. According to the students' learning level, teachers can choose materials with considerable difficulty to give systematic training, from easy to difficult, and gradually deepen. Only by reaching a certain reading speed can students' reading comprehension level be truly implemented, and students can truly feel the happiness and sense of accomplishment in reading. Here we should pay attention to two points: First, the material difficulty is slightly higher than the learners' reading level; The second is to solve problems rationally to facilitate students' self-test. If the error rate is high, the reading speed should be adjusted appropriately.

2. Pay attention to skills and read scientifically

First of all, tell students that reading aloud and reading with fingers will distract attention, affect reading speed, and make them deeply realize that they should "reform" their reading methods. Then, teach students several common reading methods, such as (1) skimming, scanning and skipping. Cultivate students to quickly find and identify the objects required by the topic; For example: ① In the following groups of words, quickly find the same words as those in brackets. The fatter the father, the faster the farmer's father has more feathers; ② Quickly find two identical words in the following groups of words. White waiter water miracle waiter is wet in winter. (2) Guess the meaning of words. Such as synonyms, antonyms, grammatical structures (such as appositives, attributive clauses, etc. ), punctuation marks (such as dashes, etc. ), common sense, word formation, etc. (3) skimming. Like how to find TopicSentence.

3. Keep reading every day

Keep reading every day and get into the habit of taking notes. By reading English newspapers and other interesting articles, I can improve my reading level imperceptibly.

Cultural obstacles and countermeasures of intransitive verbs

The essence of reading is a communication process, which is a communication process in which readers extract the information they need through reading and fill the original "information gap" between themselves and the author. In the process of reading, due to the existence of two different cultural backgrounds, readers may often be affected by cultural background obstacles.

Countermeasures: Encourage students to read more extracurricular books and broaden their cultural background knowledge.

Language is the carrier of culture. An article always reflects the identity, position and viewpoint of the author to varying degrees. Therefore, the understanding of customs and habits in different countries and regions, as well as the different ways of thinking, expression and mentality in different cultural backgrounds will directly affect students' understanding of reading materials. Teachers should not only teach language knowledge, but also teach cultural knowledge in teaching. At present, the textbooks we use cover a wide range of subjects, and we can teach the background from many aspects, such as character background, historical background, local customs, geographical background and so on. At the same time, students themselves should read different types of articles extensively to broaden their background knowledge. In the overall arrangement, the selection of pan-blasphemy textbooks should be from easy to difficult, with moderate difficulty and diverse genres; Materials should be knowledgeable, interesting, realistic and purposeful; It should conform to students' cognitive structure, which is conducive to the gradual progress of teaching.

"Rome was not built in a day." The cultivation of reading ability is a gradual process. Only when teachers truly realize the essence of reading and take corresponding countermeasures, keep practicing and dare to explore, can they hope to greatly improve students' reading speed, reading level and reading comprehension ability.