Applying Parsing Strategies into Reading Comprehension in TEM-8- A Psycholinguistic Study

Applying Parsing Strategies into Reading Comprehension in TEM-8:

A Psycholinguistic Study

摘要:《高等学校英语专业英语教学大纲》特别强调了培养学生的阅读能力,这对英语学习与教学有很深远的实践意义。英语专业八级考试,作为一种尺度参照的水平考试尤其强调了这一点。然而在实际的考试过程中,学生会遇到各种各样的问题,最终的导致他们考试成绩并不令人满意。基于对五十位英语专业的研究生的问卷和访谈,本文作者发现他们过多关注个别词的意思,从而忽视全文的结构和整篇文章的主旨意义。问卷的数据还显示被调查的学生很少在考试过程中运用阅读策略并且他们对一些阅读策略知之甚少。

关键词: 句法分析策略;阅读理解;阅读能力

1、Introduction

TEM-8 is the authoritative, unified and nationwide checking form for English-major undergraduates and it has a overwhelm impact on all circles of the society. However, most test-takers of TEM-8, who has been interviewed by the author, hold the view that reading comprehension is the most difficult part and they cannot finish the part punctually and cannot understand reading passages comprehensively.

According to the survey conducted among fifty postgraduates, reading comprehension is regarded as the most difficult section in TEM-8. Most of the test-takers mention that they cannot finish the part punctually. Through continuous interviews and questionnaires, the author finds that they have not applied proper parsing strategies, which can utmost account for their slow speed and ambiguous understanding of reading passages in TEM-8. According to Carroll (1999), a first step in the process of understanding a sentence is to assign elements of its surface structure to linguistic categories, a procedure known as parsing. And an important step into the issues of parsing is to consider that one is working from (a) observed sequences of elements and (b) knowledge of one’s language, to (c) conclusions about the hierarchical organization of those.

2、Parsing and Parsing Strategies

2.1 Definition of Parsing

According to Frazier and Fodor (1978), the parsing mechanism extracts the grammatical structure of what is said, without making sense of the meaning of the structure. In other words, parsing is to process or compute the relationships between