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1.The analysis of the problems
As far as we know,the approach of teaching intensive reading in many senior high schools is commonly called the“Grammar-Translation Approach”. The methods can be briefly described as follows: before going to class. Students are usua11y asked to prepare the new lessons,that is, to read the text, look up the meaning of the new vocabulary in the word list or in a dictionary, and underline words or sentences they don’t understand. In class, the intensive reading lesson generally has two focuses: one is word study, which is often performed with the teacher taking out some key or difficult words or phrases from the text and explaining the meaning and the usage by giving examples .Another focus is study of grammar, which is usually done by the teacher explaining or analyzing some important or difficult structures either in English or in Chinese.After class, students are required to do exercises accompanying the text,then the teacher checks the answers by asking students in turn or at random to read their answers and asking other students to confirm or reject. If the students cannot do so, the teacher does it instead. Compared with current thoughts, there exist some problems in the teaching approach：
1.1 The reading activities without clear purposes
In an intensive reading class,the teacher seldom gives students a purpose before asking them to read. This causes problems because students are not asked to read for comprehension, they will not focus on understanding of the text,and they don’t have a chance to practice the reading skills ofprediction,guessing,scanning, skimming, etc. Moreover, there is no pre-teaching, this also causes problems because high school students often have difficulties in understanding an English text, for their lack of the background knowledge such as culture, customs and history.Therefore, the students will probably have no expectation about what they are going to read,and the result may be that they cannot read efficiently．
1.2 The bad reading habits
It is a serious problem in reading that many students tend to read a text at an intolerably slow speed．This problem has a number of causes: firstly, students are expected to go through a text word by word or phrase by phrase．Students trained in this way often tend to stop at some difficult words instead of skipping over it. They try to understand each individual item instead of the whole. Secondly, the teacher frequently gives students the translation．Thus,students form a habit of trying to seek a Chinese equivalent for each language item in their mind, which consequently slows their reading speed. Fourthly,students are often required to prepare new lessons by looking up the new words in a dictionary. Gradually students form the habit of over-reliance on the dictionary. Therefore, every time they come across a new word, they consult the dictionary, even if they can actuallyguess the meaning by using useful clues. But this not only slows their reading speed, but also hinders full understanding of the text (distracts them fromthinking as a whole).Finally, most teachers seldom force students to read quickly by using effective strategies, such as timing,skimming and scanning.
1.3 Students’ relying on teacher
In most of the intensive reading classes,students are seldom given a chanceto think or to make predictions actively and independently. Teachers explain nearly everything and solve all the problems for students. Therefore,what students need to do is to mechanicallynote down all the teacher offers and memorize them. They are always in a protected position, and thus tend to rely too much on the teacher instead of thinking and solving the problems actively and independently. However, in their actual work in the future, there will be no teacher to help them everywhere. They will have to manage by themselves.
2. Suggested solutions
As we have discussed in the preceding pages,in many senior high schools an intensive reading lesson is still viewed as working through a text word by word or sentence by sentence,with teachers explaining each individual language item carefully. This kind of teaching approach compared with current thoughts on the teaching of intensive reading seems to be quite inefficient. Therefore,the next section is devoted to the analysis of some current ideas and makes some practical suggestions for incorporating theminto our teaching methods.
2.1 The student-centered activities
For a long time teachers have been the dominating figures in classroom instruction. We have to realize that it is the students who are learningEnglish,not the teachers. There has been a trend in recent years to shift the focus away from the teacher and concentrate on more student-centered activities in the classroom. And the communicative methodology definitely requires a student--centered approach which places students at the center with the teachers and students as joint partners in the language learning enterprise．That is to say,students are masters of their study and the teacher becomes their friend. This can make the students more responsible for their own learning and of course make them learn more effectively.
2.2 Treating text as a meaningful whole
Reading comprehension means that readers extract the required information from a written text as efficiently as possible．That is to say, reading for information. Therefore,we can infer that reading is to concentrate on information rather than language, to focus on meaning rather thanpoints of detail. Therefore, in our intensive reading classes we should try to train our students to efficiently understand the message conveyed in a text rather than just teach the usage of individual words or grammatical rules.
2.3 Finding main ideas
Techniques for teaching students to find the main idea most often involve writing summariesorsearchingforkeywordsandtopic sentences. Students may be asked to give a one-sentence phrase“title” for a particular passage or write new titles for stories or articles.
2.4 Guessing the meaning
The ability to guess from context is clearly a valuable skill and one that should playa part in textual exploitation in class. Guessing words involves making use of the context in which the word appears to derive an idea of its meaning,or in some cases to guess from the word itself or making use of our previous knowledge of English to guess the meaning of new words.
2.5 Inferring and evaluating
Methods for developing this skill may be：Raise some questions about reasoning and judging,guide thestudents to have discussions according to the details and to find out the answers to them．And we can adopt discussions about such questions as“What do you think of…? How do you like…?”To foster the ability of evaluation.
2.6 Improving reading speed
Reading speed is extremely important for efficient reading. And the new English teaching syllabus requires： “ Senior high school students should be able to read English materials at a speed of 50-60 words a minute and understand
70% of the content correctly.”Therefore,in our intensive reading lessons,teachers shouldmake efforts to improve students’ reading speed. Firstly,teachers may train the students to take in sense groups (thelargerthebetter), not word by wordwhenreading a passage．Secondly,such strategies as skimming, scanning etc．should be introduced to the students. Reading the texts in class in a limited time for identifying main ideas and the author’s opinion and purpose or matching titles to thearticlescanbe a greathelpin trainingthesestrategies.
3. Conclusion
The intensive reading course in many high schools is very dull and inefficient. Most high school graduates can not use English to communicate though they have spent more than four hours a week studying English for at least six years. Although there are numerous factors that influence foreign language education, methodology is the most important one. Most high school teachers of English have been trained under the traditional grammar-translation method which is highly structured, teacher-centered, and grammar-based. But now the new educational policy put particular emphasis on the language competence of students. For this purpose, we should reform the traditional language teaching method and make it more scientific, efficient and effective.
As far as we know,the approach of teaching intensive reading in many senior high schools is commonly called the“Grammar-Translation Approach”. The methods can be briefly described as follows: before going to class. Students are usua11y asked to prepare the new lessons,that is, to read the text, look up the meaning of the new vocabulary in the word list or in a dictionary, and underline words or sentences they don’t understand. In class, the intensive reading lesson generally has two focuses: one is word study, which is often performed with the teacher taking out some key or difficult words or phrases from the text and explaining the meaning and the usage by giving examples .Another focus is study of grammar, which is usually done by the teacher explaining or analyzing some important or difficult structures either in English or in Chinese.After class, students are required to do exercises accompanying the text,then the teacher checks the answers by asking students in turn or at random to read their answers and asking other students to confirm or reject. If the students cannot do so, the teacher does it instead. Compared with current thoughts, there exist some problems in the teaching approach：
1.1 The reading activities without clear purposes
In an intensive reading class,the teacher seldom gives students a purpose before asking them to read. This causes problems because students are not asked to read for comprehension, they will not focus on understanding of the text,and they don’t have a chance to practice the reading skills ofprediction,guessing,scanning, skimming, etc. Moreover, there is no pre-teaching, this also causes problems because high school students often have difficulties in understanding an English text, for their lack of the background knowledge such as culture, customs and history.Therefore, the students will probably have no expectation about what they are going to read,and the result may be that they cannot read efficiently．
1.2 The bad reading habits
It is a serious problem in reading that many students tend to read a text at an intolerably slow speed．This problem has a number of causes: firstly, students are expected to go through a text word by word or phrase by phrase．Students trained in this way often tend to stop at some difficult words instead of skipping over it. They try to understand each individual item instead of the whole. Secondly, the teacher frequently gives students the translation．Thus,students form a habit of trying to seek a Chinese equivalent for each language item in their mind, which consequently slows their reading speed. Fourthly,students are often required to prepare new lessons by looking up the new words in a dictionary. Gradually students form the habit of over-reliance on the dictionary. Therefore, every time they come across a new word, they consult the dictionary, even if they can actuallyguess the meaning by using useful clues. But this not only slows their reading speed, but also hinders full understanding of the text (distracts them fromthinking as a whole).Finally, most teachers seldom force students to read quickly by using effective strategies, such as timing,skimming and scanning.
1.3 Students’ relying on teacher
In most of the intensive reading classes,students are seldom given a chanceto think or to make predictions actively and independently. Teachers explain nearly everything and solve all the problems for students. Therefore,what students need to do is to mechanicallynote down all the teacher offers and memorize them. They are always in a protected position, and thus tend to rely too much on the teacher instead of thinking and solving the problems actively and independently. However, in their actual work in the future, there will be no teacher to help them everywhere. They will have to manage by themselves.
2. Suggested solutions
As we have discussed in the preceding pages,in many senior high schools an intensive reading lesson is still viewed as working through a text word by word or sentence by sentence,with teachers explaining each individual language item carefully. This kind of teaching approach compared with current thoughts on the teaching of intensive reading seems to be quite inefficient. Therefore,the next section is devoted to the analysis of some current ideas and makes some practical suggestions for incorporating theminto our teaching methods.
2.1 The student-centered activities
For a long time teachers have been the dominating figures in classroom instruction. We have to realize that it is the students who are learningEnglish,not the teachers. There has been a trend in recent years to shift the focus away from the teacher and concentrate on more student-centered activities in the classroom. And the communicative methodology definitely requires a student--centered approach which places students at the center with the teachers and students as joint partners in the language learning enterprise．That is to say,students are masters of their study and the teacher becomes their friend. This can make the students more responsible for their own learning and of course make them learn more effectively.
2.2 Treating text as a meaningful whole
Reading comprehension means that readers extract the required information from a written text as efficiently as possible．That is to say, reading for information. Therefore,we can infer that reading is to concentrate on information rather than language, to focus on meaning rather thanpoints of detail. Therefore, in our intensive reading classes we should try to train our students to efficiently understand the message conveyed in a text rather than just teach the usage of individual words or grammatical rules.
2.3 Finding main ideas
Techniques for teaching students to find the main idea most often involve writing summariesorsearchingforkeywordsandtopic sentences. Students may be asked to give a one-sentence phrase“title” for a particular passage or write new titles for stories or articles.
2.4 Guessing the meaning
The ability to guess from context is clearly a valuable skill and one that should playa part in textual exploitation in class. Guessing words involves making use of the context in which the word appears to derive an idea of its meaning,or in some cases to guess from the word itself or making use of our previous knowledge of English to guess the meaning of new words.
2.5 Inferring and evaluating
Methods for developing this skill may be：Raise some questions about reasoning and judging,guide thestudents to have discussions according to the details and to find out the answers to them．And we can adopt discussions about such questions as“What do you think of…? How do you like…?”To foster the ability of evaluation.
2.6 Improving reading speed
Reading speed is extremely important for efficient reading. And the new English teaching syllabus requires： “ Senior high school students should be able to read English materials at a speed of 50-60 words a minute and understand
70% of the content correctly.”Therefore,in our intensive reading lessons,teachers shouldmake efforts to improve students’ reading speed. Firstly,teachers may train the students to take in sense groups (thelargerthebetter), not word by wordwhenreading a passage．Secondly,such strategies as skimming, scanning etc．should be introduced to the students. Reading the texts in class in a limited time for identifying main ideas and the author’s opinion and purpose or matching titles to thearticlescanbe a greathelpin trainingthesestrategies.
3. Conclusion
The intensive reading course in many high schools is very dull and inefficient. Most high school graduates can not use English to communicate though they have spent more than four hours a week studying English for at least six years. Although there are numerous factors that influence foreign language education, methodology is the most important one. Most high school teachers of English have been trained under the traditional grammar-translation method which is highly structured, teacher-centered, and grammar-based. But now the new educational policy put particular emphasis on the language competence of students. For this purpose, we should reform the traditional language teaching method and make it more scientific, efficient and effective.