English reading skills and English reading strategies

Reading is an important part of comprehensive language ability, which directly affects students' information receiving ability and understanding ability, so it is very important to cultivate reading skills. Reading is a process full of positive thinking activities, and reading activities are also a creative practice. It can be roughly divided into three types: learning type, leisure type and specificity type. Reading is a very important part of English learning, and it is not only reading many words, but also a skill to cultivate all kinds of English abilities. Including continuous thinking, guessing, forecasting, testing and self-questioning, and improving the ability of listening, speaking and writing, will bring us unprecedented training and improvement in this process. This paper expounds English reading skills from many aspects. Using these skills will help to improve reading speed, absorb the essence of the article, enhance English reading ability and improve English level.

Keywords English reading skills judgment

China Library Classification. H3 19 Document ID number A1674-4810 (2011) 23-0068-02.

English reading is an important part of English learning. Through reading, we can enlarge our vocabulary, increase our familiarity with English language sense, speed and context, and improve our listening, speaking and writing abilities. With the increasing content, scope and level of foreign language teaching, the requirement for reading ability is getting higher and higher. Reading is not simply browsing the text, nor simply understanding the text. Reading is a complex psychological process, and the reading process is also a process in which readers use grammar, vocabulary, discourse, rhetoric and background knowledge to complete "decoding". In the process of reading, we must persist in thinking, so as to effectively improve our reading height. This does not mean that all problems can be solved, because the solution of the problem lies in our re-understanding of the problem. There are some technical problems in English reading, and the author explains them in detail from the following four points:

First, we must grasp the key points.

English articles are a whole. Through the conception and layout of the whole article, the author demonstrates, explains, narrates and describes things, and permeates relevant knowledge and information to readers. The main title or subtitle is usually used to highly summarize the content of the text and point out the theme of the article. Therefore, before reading the text, you can predict the main content of the text with the help of the title. Knowledge and information are in the whole article, not isolated in words. When reading sentences, paragraphs and articles, we should grasp the overall information and deal with problems from the overall principle.

Overall reading is mainly divided into two levels:

1. Read the chapter

The view of "parallel interactive reading mode" holds that the integrity of a text is not only manifested in the connection of words, sentences and paragraphs on the surface structure or structural level, but also in a semantic center on the deep structure or intention level, that is, the author's intention and writing purpose.

When reading an article, we should follow the following pattern, that is, guide the whole article from seven aspects: article title; Author; Data, basic contents and facts; Characteristics of the article; Controversy and criticism, as well as the possibility of new ideas and applications of the article. This can avoid blindness and negligence in reading. When reading, you can focus on useful information, which can greatly reduce the time to deal with useless information and make the information organized and easy to understand and absorb.

Step 2 read sentences and paragraphs

As we all know, an article is composed of paragraphs. Familiarity with paragraphs is helpful to accurately and quickly understand the content and development trend of the article, thus making the reading process smoother. According to the different functions of paragraphs, we can divide them into different types. It can be roughly divided into: theme section, support section, transition section and conclusion section. They all play their respective roles in the article and make it very clear. A well-structured paragraph is a basic unit of meaning organized by some sentences that express a unified idea through specific language means.

Second, reasonable reasoning and judgment.

The so-called reasoning ability means that readers can understand the true meaning of some paragraphs, sentences and words in the article according to the facts provided by the article, and use the common sense or experience they have learned to reflect the correct conclusion. When reading, readers often find that the author writes all the meanings to be expressed implicitly, not explicitly. Authors often skillfully use language, or use various rhetorical devices, such as metaphor, satire, humor, satire, euphemism, etc., to enhance the expressive force of their works.

1. Reasonable judgment based on reading materials.

Judgment refers to a reasonable decision based on certain facts or evidence. Readers should pay attention to remind themselves that judgment must be based on facts, materials or arguments provided by the original text. In order to make a reasonable judgment, we should: fully understand the main contents of the materials we read and grasp the facts or basis; Reasonable analysis of facts or evidence provided by reading materials; Make reasonable and effective decisions and judgments based on the facts we know and the analysis of these facts or evidence.

2. Reasoning correctly according to the reading materials.

Reasoning is another task closely related to judgment. The so-called reasoning is a comprehensive analysis of known information, such as the logical relationship between words and sentences, background and culture, in order to make a logical judgment on unknown information. Reading often requires reasoning. In order to read effectively, you must reason correctly. When reasoning, readers need to correctly understand the facts, opinions, details and other information of the article, analyze the interrelation between the information contained in the article, and combine the background of the article with their own reading experience to make inductive reasoning and make reasonable judgments, so as to draw a logically correct theory.

To capture the actual meaning of an article, language has its redundancy. English discourse is not a word, every sentence conveys meaning and thought, or the same amount of information. Some words are only structural symbols, while others only convey auxiliary information. If the superfluous words are omitted, the ideas expressed in the article will not be greatly affected. After understanding the rules of attention in English reading, readers can boldly skip prepositions, articles, conjunctions and conjunctions that have only grammatical functions but no practical significance in reading. When reading long and difficult sentences, it is necessary to make proper grammatical analysis, which can help readers understand the structure of sentences and find out the meaning of sentences. However, due to the long-term use of translation in schools, especially in college English teaching, students have developed the habit of reading and analyzing. When reading, directly convert the information you take into images, not words. This can not only deepen our understanding of the original text, but also speed up our reading.

Third, break through the vocabulary difficulties.

It is inevitable that there are many reading comprehension materials, wide contents and many new words. Some students often read, which will definitely affect the reading speed and interrupt the expansion of information and logical thinking. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the cultivation of students' meaning. Expand students' vocabulary and learn the meaning of new words in various ways. Pay attention to the internal relations of words and master several meaningful elements.

In intensive reading class, strengthen vocabulary analysis skills, let students master basic word formation, expand the scope of affixes, and master some commonly used prefixes and suffixes. In this way, students can use word formation and these clues to determine the meaning of words. We can also use the method of combining context with context. In reading, students should judge the general meaning of words through grammar knowledge, cultural background hints and logical reasoning. At the same time, paying attention to the sentence where the new word is located and the two sentences before and after it will help to guess the meaning of the new word. The learning of foreign language vocabulary generally follows the law of from difficult to easy and from shallow to deep, that is, from basic words to related words. Therefore, words that are difficult to learn at the beginning are ineffective. Similarly, repeating simple words you have mastered in the advanced stage will also make students lose interest in learning. Therefore, breaking through vocabulary difficulties is an indispensable part of learning English reading.

Fourth, avoid Chinese thinking.

In a sense, avoiding Chinese thinking is the key to improve English reading speed. English reading ability generally has four stages of development. The first stage is the literal mental translation stage, that is, the original text should be understood through word-for-word mental translation when reading. Because there are many differences between the two languages in terms of words, sentence structure and language habits, there are often misunderstandings in the understanding of the original text at this stage. The second stage is analytical psychological translation, that is, after analyzing the words and structure of the original text, psychological translation or psychological translation is carried out, and the words and structure are analyzed at the same time. At this time, the understanding rate is higher than the previous stage, but the reading speed is very slow. The third stage is the comprehensive psychological translation stage. At this time, due to the improvement of language level and the accumulation of reading experience, the original text was directly translated into the native language without analysis. The fourth stage is to understand the original text directly, that is, to reach the level of thinking in a foreign language.

Reading can be said to be a process of reasoning and error correction by using language knowledge, cultural background and logical judgment. The more knowledge a person has, the more accurate he will guess in reading, the stronger his ability to solve problems, the deeper his understanding of the article and the higher his reading efficiency. English reading methods can make different reading progress according to different reading materials and students' quality, with the aim of cultivating students' reading ability, truly mastering and understanding English articles and achieving the purpose of learning knowledge. Students need to develop good reading habits and reading skills and train them to make them more flexible. To cultivate students' English reading skills, we should not only fully tap the potential of students' fast reading ability, but also constantly stimulate students' interest in reading, satisfy students' sense of accomplishment in learning English, and cultivate students' ability to find and solve problems, think in English, communicate in English and learn English.

Five-point concluding remarks

The skills and methods of English reading are not only mentioned in this paper, but also the methods of discourse analysis are endless. The analysis of this paper proves that reading comprehension from the perspective of discourse function makes up for the deficiency of traditional reading teaching and enriches reading content and learning pleasure. Therefore, reading comprehension training at the text level can effectively make up for the limitation of reading only from vocabulary, grammar and internal structure of clauses, enhance students' awareness of the text, enable them to obtain the information conveyed by the text to the maximum extent, and thus improve students' reading comprehension ability and reading efficiency. This study has witnessed the feasibility of English reading training from the above skills, which has a certain promoting effect on English reading.

refer to

[1] Yuan Huijuan. On English reading skills [J]. Journal of Chifeng University (China Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), 2007(2)

[2] Zhang Xuezhong. Independent reading training method [M]. Dalian: Dalian University of Technology Press, 2004: 17.

[Editor: Wang Yifu]