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Abstract:On the basis of the theories of psycholinguistic perspective in language teaching and communicative approach in language learning, this paper analyses briefly some tangible errors for the Chinese students in their reading in line with the author’s own teaching experiences. The paper is an attempt at overcoming the obstacles existing between the text writers and the text readers and enabling the latter to become effective readers.
Key words:psycholinguistic, communicative, errors, reading comprehension
1 Instruction
English reading has always been considered one of the most important parts of foreign language learning. Without reading, nothing can be done in the development of the competence in listening, speaking, writing and translating. Reading courses, or rather, intensive reading ones, fill up a large component of the curricula. Obviously, students and teacher should pay great attention to the importance of reading courses. And what is reading? How can Chinese students achieve proficient reading?
2 Theory of psycholinguistic perspective and communicative approach
As we know, the psycholinguistic model of EFT is a meaning-based model proposed by Goodman (1967) and Smith (1971). Goodman thinks that in the reading process the "reader reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display" (Goodman 1973). Smith says " skill in reading actually depends on using the eyes as little as possible,as we become fluent readers we learn to rely more on what we already know, on what is behind the eyeballs, and less on the print on the page in front of us"(1978). The psycholinguists assume that if the reader has the ability to select the productive language cues, he can decode, through his psycholinguistic processing, the message in the text, and share much of information which the writer intends to convey.
The communicative approach of EFL, Which prevails after World War Ⅱ,holds that “The primary goal of most foreign language learning is to develop the ability to use real and appropriate language to communicate and interact with others, and the goal of foreign language teaching is to extend the range of communicative situation in which the learners can perform with focus on meaning without being hindered by the attention he must pay to linguistic form."(Littlewood,1981). In communicative teaching model, the class is students-centred, and communicative activities are performed between students and the teachers, students and students. But efficient communication still depends on successful decoding of the "meaning" of the discourses, that is, a listener must instantly make out what a speaker wants to get across. And communicative efficiency means that students should be able to do efficiently in all of the four skills.So reading competence, which can be considered as a communication between readers and writers, should also be brought into full consideration.
There should be something in common with both the psycholinguistic perspective of EFT and communicative approach of EFL: reading (and listening) should be regarded as an active psycholinguistic process; a text (or discourse) is assumed to have its potential meaning; and it’s real meaning depends on the reader’s(or listener’s)interaction with the text(or discourse).
3 Some Tangible Errors in Reading Comprehension
The Chinese language is totally different from the English language. The former belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and the latter to the Indo-European language family. Therefore, When Chinese learners attempt to understand a text in English, they face linguistic problems in various respects: spelling, gender, verb forms, tenses and word order. In addition to these, I’d like to discuss some other obstacles between writers and readers.
3.1 Lexical and syntactical errors
Words such as "imaginative" and "imaginary" and "respectable" are often misunderstood and misused by Chinese learners as in their mother tongue words have virtually no inflexions. In my classroom, however, I have found my students more liable to stumble over articles and prepositions. I believe the reason is that these particles are never used in the Chinese language and hence difficult to handle. For example, they may find it difficult to understand these two sentences:
①I am never at a loss for a word, and he is never at a loss for the word.
②A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
The first speaker aims at "his" proficiency of wording and "my" casual choice of words, and the second speaker wants to tell that a man is no more necessary to a woman than a bicycle to a fish. The Chinese student might feel at a loss for the meaning because he or she often overlooks the confusing "small words" such as articles and prepositions. Students may be asked to distinguish varied shades of meanings when particles are used before the teacher offers his help.
Chinese is an analytic language and the relationship between the different parts of a sentence is based on reasoning. English, however, is a synthetic language and the relationship between the different parts is usually decided by analysis of those connecting words and the sentence structure. Naturally, in most cases the ambiguity can be cleared up when we look at the context, but sometimes even the context doesn’t help. We have to make clear about "Which governs what" before we have a better understanding, especially those lengthy ones with complicated structures.
3.2Meaning "between the lines"
And moreover, Chinese readers often get lost while reading paragraphs with implied meanings or meanings"between the lines". Suppose the students are asked to read the following paragraph:
"If you are interested in buying a pair of contact lenses, be prepared to pay $200 or more. Generally there are three main reasons why people want contact lenses. You may need them because the cornea of your eye is misshapen and ordinary glass are not satisfactory. If so, you’ll be in the group that comprises 1 to 2 per cent of contact lens wearers. But you may want them for a sport, avocation, or vocation. Perhaps you’re a baseball player, a boxer, a swimmer, an aviator, an actor, or perhaps you’re engaged in an industry where flying particles may endanger your eyes. If you get your contact lenses for one of these reasons, you are in the same group with about 20 per cent of the users. But if for some reasons, you feel that glasses are handicapping our appearance and you would rather have invisible glasses, you’ll have lots of company. About 79 per cent of lens users hope to improve their looks.”
The students are then asked to make a decision：which of the following can represent the writer’s intention? A or B.
A.To give the reasons for people wearing contact lenses.
B.To say that man is sometimes vain.
In accordance with my experiences, many readers will prefer A because they can easily find enough evidence to support that decision. If we take the paragraph into further consideration however, we find that they have failed to notice the rational relationship between the users, that is, the writer never fails to mention the percentage of users when giving each reason. The majority of wearers seem to feel that contact lenses are more attractive than glasses. Although the writer purposely establishes his contextual relationship within the paragraph, it may still be difficult for the students to work out what he really means to transfer.
3.3Anaphoric expressions
Anaphoric expression is another pitfall for Chinese students in their reading comprehension. According to Gui Shichun (1991), reference, substitution, ellipsis and lexical cohesion are often talked about under that topic of anaphora in Halliday’s and Hasan’s writings. By reference and substitution the author means the fact that a writer refers back or forward to a word, a fact, a sentence or whatever has been mentioned somewhere else in the text. Besides pronouns, almost all other parts of speech can be used as reference words. Usually these words follow closely the parts they refer to, but sometimes they appear far from the mentioned parts. Students should be able to identify the coreference, and, if necessary, they should be asked to search the adjacent text until they find the required referents.
3.4 Different ways of thinking and expression
Chinese people and English native speakers have different ways of thinking and modes of expression, owing to their respective and unique social practice and geographic environments. In this connection arise the problems in our students’ comprehension of their English texts: because we don’t have their experiences, we don’t know what it means, not only linguistically, but also emotionally and cognitively.
A case in point is the English way of negation. We often come across the statements which are affirmative in form but negative in content, or vice versa. "I know better" means" I don’t think so", while" I couldn’t feel better" is understood as "I’m feeling great". The following two sentences may also puzzle the Chinese readers:
You could have come at a better time.
I hope you’re none the worse for that fall from your horse.
To Chinese students, English speaking people have a peculiar way of negation in the above two sentences. In my class only efficient readers can understand the first sentence as "You have come at a wrong time" and the second one as "I hope you didn’t hurt by the fall from your horse."
Ambiguity sometimes arises when Chinese people and English speaking people look at things at different angles. Look at these sentences:
I was sitting behind a pint.
He was not the eldest son of his father for nothing.
In my class, not all students can understand the first sentence as "I was drinking beer" and the second one as "He was a capable eldest son of his father", influenced by their own idiomatic way of saying things, Chinese students have an inclination to mistake an English idiom for a Chinese one.
3.5Non -linguistic information
Reading needs both visual and non-visual information. If a reader lacks non-visual information (what he has already known about the reading text, about the language, and about the world in general), his interpretation of the visual information will be severely limited, because what he can see is his brain’s interpretation of the brain (Smith, 1973). This is an interaction between thought and graphic designs. Therefore, in order to decode those graphic designs, a reader must be equipped with both the knowledge of language and of the world, just as Scott (1984) says" reading is essentially a top-down’ process, whereby the reader samples the text visually, a teacher may take these two things into account: one is that the reading material should be readable for the Chinese students; the other is that the necessary prior knowledge should be provided in one way or another".
4 Conclusion
In this study I can quote several more restraints which hinders the Chinese students from efficient reading. However, my intention here is not to make an overall description of the known facts, but to bring our attention to some of the pitfalls, which particularly trap the Chinese students into misunderstanding. To make the reading class more efficient, we have for many years incorporated some foreign language teaching techniques into the present framework. However, this does not mean to discard completely the traditional way or adopt an out-and-out new foreign approach. As we are teaching Chinese students inside of China, any teaching methodology deviating from the concrete situation is neither possible nor realistic. The correct attitude we should have is to adopt advanced foreign theories on the one hand, and build on the strengths already inherent in the present teaching framework on the other. In conclusion, since a reading class is by nature a text-based one, we should go into further study of the constraints existing between the students and their texts, so as to help them remove the impediments to the communication between writers and readers, and enable them to become effective readers.
References:
[1]Smith, F. Understanding Reading[M]. New York: Holt, Rinehart
Key words:psycholinguistic, communicative, errors, reading comprehension
1 Instruction
English reading has always been considered one of the most important parts of foreign language learning. Without reading, nothing can be done in the development of the competence in listening, speaking, writing and translating. Reading courses, or rather, intensive reading ones, fill up a large component of the curricula. Obviously, students and teacher should pay great attention to the importance of reading courses. And what is reading? How can Chinese students achieve proficient reading?
2 Theory of psycholinguistic perspective and communicative approach
As we know, the psycholinguistic model of EFT is a meaning-based model proposed by Goodman (1967) and Smith (1971). Goodman thinks that in the reading process the "reader reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display" (Goodman 1973). Smith says " skill in reading actually depends on using the eyes as little as possible,as we become fluent readers we learn to rely more on what we already know, on what is behind the eyeballs, and less on the print on the page in front of us"(1978). The psycholinguists assume that if the reader has the ability to select the productive language cues, he can decode, through his psycholinguistic processing, the message in the text, and share much of information which the writer intends to convey.
The communicative approach of EFL, Which prevails after World War Ⅱ,holds that “The primary goal of most foreign language learning is to develop the ability to use real and appropriate language to communicate and interact with others, and the goal of foreign language teaching is to extend the range of communicative situation in which the learners can perform with focus on meaning without being hindered by the attention he must pay to linguistic form."(Littlewood,1981). In communicative teaching model, the class is students-centred, and communicative activities are performed between students and the teachers, students and students. But efficient communication still depends on successful decoding of the "meaning" of the discourses, that is, a listener must instantly make out what a speaker wants to get across. And communicative efficiency means that students should be able to do efficiently in all of the four skills.So reading competence, which can be considered as a communication between readers and writers, should also be brought into full consideration.
There should be something in common with both the psycholinguistic perspective of EFT and communicative approach of EFL: reading (and listening) should be regarded as an active psycholinguistic process; a text (or discourse) is assumed to have its potential meaning; and it’s real meaning depends on the reader’s(or listener’s)interaction with the text(or discourse).
3 Some Tangible Errors in Reading Comprehension
The Chinese language is totally different from the English language. The former belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and the latter to the Indo-European language family. Therefore, When Chinese learners attempt to understand a text in English, they face linguistic problems in various respects: spelling, gender, verb forms, tenses and word order. In addition to these, I’d like to discuss some other obstacles between writers and readers.
3.1 Lexical and syntactical errors
Words such as "imaginative" and "imaginary" and "respectable" are often misunderstood and misused by Chinese learners as in their mother tongue words have virtually no inflexions. In my classroom, however, I have found my students more liable to stumble over articles and prepositions. I believe the reason is that these particles are never used in the Chinese language and hence difficult to handle. For example, they may find it difficult to understand these two sentences:
①I am never at a loss for a word, and he is never at a loss for the word.
②A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
The first speaker aims at "his" proficiency of wording and "my" casual choice of words, and the second speaker wants to tell that a man is no more necessary to a woman than a bicycle to a fish. The Chinese student might feel at a loss for the meaning because he or she often overlooks the confusing "small words" such as articles and prepositions. Students may be asked to distinguish varied shades of meanings when particles are used before the teacher offers his help.
Chinese is an analytic language and the relationship between the different parts of a sentence is based on reasoning. English, however, is a synthetic language and the relationship between the different parts is usually decided by analysis of those connecting words and the sentence structure. Naturally, in most cases the ambiguity can be cleared up when we look at the context, but sometimes even the context doesn’t help. We have to make clear about "Which governs what" before we have a better understanding, especially those lengthy ones with complicated structures.
3.2Meaning "between the lines"
And moreover, Chinese readers often get lost while reading paragraphs with implied meanings or meanings"between the lines". Suppose the students are asked to read the following paragraph:
"If you are interested in buying a pair of contact lenses, be prepared to pay $200 or more. Generally there are three main reasons why people want contact lenses. You may need them because the cornea of your eye is misshapen and ordinary glass are not satisfactory. If so, you’ll be in the group that comprises 1 to 2 per cent of contact lens wearers. But you may want them for a sport, avocation, or vocation. Perhaps you’re a baseball player, a boxer, a swimmer, an aviator, an actor, or perhaps you’re engaged in an industry where flying particles may endanger your eyes. If you get your contact lenses for one of these reasons, you are in the same group with about 20 per cent of the users. But if for some reasons, you feel that glasses are handicapping our appearance and you would rather have invisible glasses, you’ll have lots of company. About 79 per cent of lens users hope to improve their looks.”
The students are then asked to make a decision：which of the following can represent the writer’s intention? A or B.
A.To give the reasons for people wearing contact lenses.
B.To say that man is sometimes vain.
In accordance with my experiences, many readers will prefer A because they can easily find enough evidence to support that decision. If we take the paragraph into further consideration however, we find that they have failed to notice the rational relationship between the users, that is, the writer never fails to mention the percentage of users when giving each reason. The majority of wearers seem to feel that contact lenses are more attractive than glasses. Although the writer purposely establishes his contextual relationship within the paragraph, it may still be difficult for the students to work out what he really means to transfer.
3.3Anaphoric expressions
Anaphoric expression is another pitfall for Chinese students in their reading comprehension. According to Gui Shichun (1991), reference, substitution, ellipsis and lexical cohesion are often talked about under that topic of anaphora in Halliday’s and Hasan’s writings. By reference and substitution the author means the fact that a writer refers back or forward to a word, a fact, a sentence or whatever has been mentioned somewhere else in the text. Besides pronouns, almost all other parts of speech can be used as reference words. Usually these words follow closely the parts they refer to, but sometimes they appear far from the mentioned parts. Students should be able to identify the coreference, and, if necessary, they should be asked to search the adjacent text until they find the required referents.
3.4 Different ways of thinking and expression
Chinese people and English native speakers have different ways of thinking and modes of expression, owing to their respective and unique social practice and geographic environments. In this connection arise the problems in our students’ comprehension of their English texts: because we don’t have their experiences, we don’t know what it means, not only linguistically, but also emotionally and cognitively.
A case in point is the English way of negation. We often come across the statements which are affirmative in form but negative in content, or vice versa. "I know better" means" I don’t think so", while" I couldn’t feel better" is understood as "I’m feeling great". The following two sentences may also puzzle the Chinese readers:
You could have come at a better time.
I hope you’re none the worse for that fall from your horse.
To Chinese students, English speaking people have a peculiar way of negation in the above two sentences. In my class only efficient readers can understand the first sentence as "You have come at a wrong time" and the second one as "I hope you didn’t hurt by the fall from your horse."
Ambiguity sometimes arises when Chinese people and English speaking people look at things at different angles. Look at these sentences:
I was sitting behind a pint.
He was not the eldest son of his father for nothing.
In my class, not all students can understand the first sentence as "I was drinking beer" and the second one as "He was a capable eldest son of his father", influenced by their own idiomatic way of saying things, Chinese students have an inclination to mistake an English idiom for a Chinese one.
3.5Non -linguistic information
Reading needs both visual and non-visual information. If a reader lacks non-visual information (what he has already known about the reading text, about the language, and about the world in general), his interpretation of the visual information will be severely limited, because what he can see is his brain’s interpretation of the brain (Smith, 1973). This is an interaction between thought and graphic designs. Therefore, in order to decode those graphic designs, a reader must be equipped with both the knowledge of language and of the world, just as Scott (1984) says" reading is essentially a top-down’ process, whereby the reader samples the text visually, a teacher may take these two things into account: one is that the reading material should be readable for the Chinese students; the other is that the necessary prior knowledge should be provided in one way or another".
4 Conclusion
In this study I can quote several more restraints which hinders the Chinese students from efficient reading. However, my intention here is not to make an overall description of the known facts, but to bring our attention to some of the pitfalls, which particularly trap the Chinese students into misunderstanding. To make the reading class more efficient, we have for many years incorporated some foreign language teaching techniques into the present framework. However, this does not mean to discard completely the traditional way or adopt an out-and-out new foreign approach. As we are teaching Chinese students inside of China, any teaching methodology deviating from the concrete situation is neither possible nor realistic. The correct attitude we should have is to adopt advanced foreign theories on the one hand, and build on the strengths already inherent in the present teaching framework on the other. In conclusion, since a reading class is by nature a text-based one, we should go into further study of the constraints existing between the students and their texts, so as to help them remove the impediments to the communication between writers and readers, and enable them to become effective readers.
References:
[1]Smith, F. Understanding Reading[M]. New York: Holt, Rinehart