1、AbstractThe thesis aims to highlight the important role that reading plays in the university English study. University English reading is an effective approach to enlarging vocabulary, strengthening language knowledge, enriching expressing skills and improving expressing quality. In practice, listen
2、ing and speaking are important, however, without reading, it is impossible to improve oral expressing quality, nor achieve the goal of writing and translating.The thesis adopted a questionnaire, 80 university English major were participated in the investigation. The analysis of results was performed
3、 in the form of tables and a column chart.Finally, from the questionnaire that has been carried out, analyze the statistics and summarize some countermeasures, stimulant students interests, cultivate students reading skills, input foreign culture and give them some reading strategies to solve the pr
4、oblem. It aims to help students develop good reading habits and improve their reading ability.Key words：English majorEnglish readingInfluential factorsCountermeasures摘要本文的目的是为了进一步强调英语阅读在大学生英语学习中的重要作用。大学英语阅读既是扩大词汇的有效途径，也是巩固已有语言知识，丰富表达技巧，提高表达质量的有效途径。在实际中，听和说是重要的，但如果没有阅读，口语表达质量的提高就很难提高。就不可能有向写和译方面转化的质的
5、飞跃。本文采用了问卷调查的形式对 80 名英语专业的大学生进行了调查，调查结果分别用表格和柱形图进行了分析。最后,从所调查的问卷，分别从激起学生兴趣、培养学生的阅读技巧、进行相应的外国文化输入以及对待不同文章的阅读策略方面总结了一些解决问题的对策，旨在帮助学生养成良好阅读习惯及提高阅读能力。关键词：英语专业英语阅读影响因素对策ContentsAbstract.i摘要iiChapter One Introduction1Chapter Two Literature Review.32.1 The Definition of Reading32.2 Factors Involved in Engl
6、ish Reading.42.3Three Models of Reading52.3.1bottom-up approach.52.3.2top-down approach62.3.3interactive model.7ChapterThreeResearch Methodology.83.1 Research Objective.83.2 Subjects83.3 Instrument83.4 Procedure.9Chapter Four Results and Countermeasures104.1 Results and Analysis from Questionnaire.1
7、04.2 The Analysis of Influential Factors.114.2.1 Linguistic factors.124.2.2 Non-linguistic factors154.3Countermeasures.174.3.1Reading strategies.174.3.2Stimulating Students Interest.174.3.3Inputting culture.18Chapter Five Conclusion20References. 21Appendix I. .22Appendix II23The Analysis of Reading
8、Barriers in English Major andthe CountermeasuresChapter One IntroductionWith the development and improvement of international exchange，English has become an essential tool for communication among people from different nations and regions. The present study is a survey study which attempts to emphasi
9、ze the importance of English reading in university students study and to know some difficulties they meet when they are reading .It aims to summarizepropermethods and countermeasures to help students improve their English reading ability.80 English major students were participated in this survey in
10、the form of responding to a questionnaire.Reading is quite essential for language acquisition，especially in the environment of studying English as a foreign language. In present-day society，with the economic globalization，two-thirds of newspapers ,magazines and periodical spread in English all over
11、the world. Therefore, English reading plays avery important role in college studentsacquisition of knowledge and analysis of English material increasingly. At present,reading is the major input of language, during the learning process of college students, among the four language skillslistening,spea
12、king ,reading ,and writing, reading has accounted a lot. As Kristen(1985) said ,“reading is good for language acquisition;it promotes better spelling, better writing skills, higher reading comprehension and more advanced vocabulary.”Ones reading ability is a major indication of his integrative langu
13、age proficiency. But compared with a lot of theoretical research in English reading, survey studies are superior to theoretical ones.Studies abroad，they are based on the design of good experiment to demonstrate the limitations of existing theories. It aimsto revise and improve the existing theories(
14、Inagaki S,2002). In contrary, studies at home,English reading research focused on schema theory to guide English reading and English teaching, application of reading strategies and theory basis, the mental process of reading and so on(Yi,2003). In general, studies at home were more inclined to the w
15、orship of existing models and theories, to apply them directly.The present study is a survey study on the influential factors in college students English reading .With the help of a questionnaire, the present study attempts to find out the difficulties that college students always confront with in E
16、nglish reading and try to offer countermeasures to solve them. The thesis consists of five chapters. This chapter is an introduction. Chapter Two is a literature review，which gives the definition of reading and countermeasures，methods of reading and some related studies. Chapter three presents the r
17、esearch method， research question and data collection. Chapter Four describes the results and analysis from the questionnaire as well as effective countermeasures. And Chapter Five is the last part of this study. It summarize the major findings，implications and also gives the recommendations for fut
18、ure studies.Chapter Two Literature ReviewThis chapter contains three sections. The first section is about the definition of reading and second section is about factors involved in English reading and the last one is three models of reading.2.1 The Definition of ReadingAuthorities and experts on the
19、teaching of reading have different views on what reading is. In general terms, reading involves the reader, the text,and the interaction between reader and text .According to Douglas(1981:82),the nature of silent reading is about the behavior of a reader. The text and the reader do not constitute ac
20、tual reading. What constitutes actual reading is the interaction between the text and reader.Francoise(1981:5) defined from the aspect of information ,“Understanding a written text means extracting the required information from it as efficiently as possible. ”This means reading is a comprehensive pr
21、ocess. Wilga(1987:187) describes a similar idea that reading is a complex, actively thinking psychological activity, which is not a passive, but rather an active process. Reading is also a completelyindividual activity. It is the mental activities that readers focus on in order to construct his mean
22、ing and understanding from a text.However,Nuttal(1982:222) disagreed that reading necessarily involved understanding:“reading is the identification of linguistic forms from strings of written configuration that present them,as evidenced by producing the conventional signs for the same linguistic for
23、m in some other system of representation.”Although there are different views about a precise definition of reading, the most useful and practical one to todays English reading is not only an active process, but also a comprehensive process. In English reading, find weakness and try to close the gap.
24、2.2 Factors Involved in English readingStudents often have difficulties in improving their reading ability. These difficulties not onlyresult from their method of learning, but mostly from their lack of basic knowledge aboutsentencestructures, parts of speech, tense, voice,and non-predicting verbs a
25、nd so on. Also they are lacking of vocabulary and some background knowledge of the English- speaking countries.In view of Krash(1985:103), three sub-factors need to be taken account into their part to promote reading competence. They are adequate vocabulary, ability to speculate on lexical meanings
26、and awareness of lexical deviations. Vocabulary serves as the most preliminary foundation for English reading comprehension. But only few students admit that they have adequate vocabulary to fulfill their understanding.Grammar roles and sentence patterns are also fundamental elementsin English readi
27、ng. Because of the grammar confusion, students often do not understand the reading material although they know all the words. If the students are unable to distinguish the main clause from a subordinate clause and are unable to know their relationships, despite understanding the meaning of every wor
28、d in the sentence, understanding is unlikely to occur with accuracy.Language is rather like a mirror that reflects the national culture of its speaker. The American linguist Sapir thinks the language cannot exist without culture. Culture can be explained as what the society does and thinks, and the
29、language is the expression the ideas of society. Obviously, culture is one of the keys in English reading. Therefore, confronted with cultural differences，readers should be given the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the target culture.Mother tongue is a double edged sword, on the one hand,
30、 reading habits and reading experiences of the mother tongue may facilitate English reading. On the other hand, the native patterns and culture may hinder the process of English reading to some extent. 2.3 Three Models of ReadingThis part will discuss three models of reading: bottom-up approach, top
31、-down approach and interactive model.2.3.1Bottom-up ApproachUntil now, the bottom-up approach leads both first and second language research and theory. According to Cambourne(1979), bottom-up approach was the basis of theoverwhelming majority of reading schemes. Thebottom-up approach regard reading
32、as a process of decoding written symbols into their aural equivalents in a linear fashion. Cambourne(1979) uses the following illustration of how the process is supposed to work: printevery letter phonemes and blendingpronunciationmeaning.Thus, one firstdistinguishes each letter as it is encountered
33、, Sounds these out, matches the written symbols with their aural equivalents blends these together to form words, and derives meaning. The derivation of meaning is thus the final procedure in which the language is translated from one of symbolic representation to another .In the early stage of readi
34、ng it would be a reasonable explanation of reading process to teach learners the sound-symbol correspondences and, actually, this is the most popular approach to teaching readingthe phonics approach，in which learners are taught to decode words by matching written symbols with their aural equivalents
35、. However, there are a crowd of critics about this approach because it emphasizes meaning in the process. Evidence against the notion that reading is a matter of decoding letters to soundsin a linear way also came from work carried out in the 1970s by researchers with a technique miscue analysis. Th
36、e technique pioneered by Goodman and Burke(1972), contains the analysis of errors made by the reader when reading the text loudly. It shows that reading is more than mechanical decoding. Those readers who are reading for meaning generate miscue that makessense semantically.2.3.2 Top-Down ApproachIns
37、ights from sources are mentioned above results in the postulation of alternative to the bottom-up, phonics approach. This has been known as the top-down or psycholinguistic approach to reading. According to the view，one begins with a series of hypothesis or predictions about the meaning of the text,
38、 which one is about to read ,and then selectively samples the text to determine whether or not the predictions are correct. Top-down processing has been used to represent that reading is a process of reconstructing meaning rather than decoding form, and readers only resort to decode if other meaning
39、 fail. Cambourne(1979) gives the following schematization of the approach: past experience, languageselective aspectsmeaningsound,pronunciation.From what I have discussed, readers can understand that this approach emphasizes the reconstruction of meaning rather than the decoding of form. The interac
40、tion of reading and the text is the core to the process, instead of decoding each symbol, or even every word.2.3.3 Interactive ModelInteractive model is one of the newest outcomes of modern reading theories.It adopts the two traditional models(bottom-up broaden vocabulary; and then improve self-cult
41、ivation of knowledge about culture background. It is very important for them to grasp some reading skills, such as, guessing words from the title, the context, the comparison, the definition, etc.; skimming, scanningand so on.According to the statistics from the questionnaire, the countermeasures ar
42、e concluded from thefollowing aspects. First,enlarge vocabulary. The elements of language are phonetic, vocabulary and grammar. Vocabulary is the fundamental element to language，master enough vocabulary is one of the major signs in English reading. An important part of improving the efficiency of re
43、ading is to enlarge ones vocabulary.It not only decides ones ability of reading comprehension, but also affects ones improvement of reading ability. Lili(2000:99), pointed that“Where does the trouble lie for Chinese learners with English vocabulary in reading comprehension? the biggest barrier for t
44、hem lies in two aspects: how to learn a reasonably large vocabulary and how to use it in reading for a comparatively good comprehension.” Second, consolidate grammar, with the help of grammar,students can analyze the sentence structure in a clear way. Third, rich cultural background knowledge of Eng
45、lish speaking countries, English reading comprehension is a vital part in language learning. Through reading, University students can understand their culture and language, the relationship between and culture is generated at the same time and interdependence. Last but not least, master reading stra
46、tegies can help university students improve their English reading competence, skimming, unfamiliar material demands a more complete overview, we would resort to skimming with its greater attention to topic and summary sentence, and other cues within the paragraph.4.3.2 Stimulating Students InterestI
47、nterest is the best teacher. It may activate the students attention, passion, active thinking, thus giving a valuable condition for mastering the target language. To achieve this goal, several aspects should be considered in teaching.Students needs are expected to be analyzed so as to locate appropr
48、iate reading materials and teaching contents. One of Krashens (1988) conditions for the most appropriate language input is to match the language input with the students needs. In addition, reading should be guided by the individual interest and needs and the authentic reading materials should be appropriately chosen for light r
