2.4. Application of Cooperative Learning to English Reading Class
2.4 .1.The Present Situation of English Reading Teaching
The traditional English reading teaching in schools is dominated by a teacher-centered, examination-oriented, grammar and vocabulary-based method. Knowledge of English is transmitted through the instructor who acts as an authority, a knowledge-giver and moral example to students who are simply silent passive knowledge receivers. An English reading class begins with new words learning, in the process of which all the important usages of the new words are listed and several example sentences are offered. The following step is the detailed construing of the text, where the notes are transmitted from the instructor’s notebook to students.
To strong students, they are likely to make progress as expected; while to the majority of students, they may fail to improve as the instructor hopes. As a consequence, the disparity between them becomes larger and larger and many students gradually lose the interest in English learning, especially English reading. It’s beyond any doubt that the ultimate goal of English reading is to obtain information from what is being read. Students read just for language acquisition so as to “become literate” and they can “see the trees” clearly enough. However, both the instructor and students stop at the second period: reading for the acquisition of information to “see the forest”. As a result, students miss the opportunity to develop part of their attention to the analysis of logical relations between sentences and paragraphs and thus they have great difficulty in identifying the main idea of each paragraph to make a logical reasonable judgment about the writer's intended message. Thus it is not the class itself but how the class is conducted that stops students “seeing the forest”. Now that the traditional English reading teaching cannot offer possible solutions to all these problems, new teaching methods ought to be attempted to make a change. 合作学习在中学英语阅读教学中的应用(4):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_9517.html