英语文献综述

Literature review of reading issues

Reading is regarded as the one of the four basic skills in language learning because people get information through reading as well as listening rather than speaking and writing. However, the widespread of Communicative Language Teaching nowadays avert more of educator’s attention from reading to speaking all over the world, particularly in Asian countries like China whereas reading comprehension is the most important and necessary part in all English exams. This makes reading instruction in a dilemma and unpopular in most Chinese universities because regular classes generally tend to emphasize reading the course book assigned rather than extensive reading.Both of intensive reading and extensive reading are necessary in reading instruction.Important text characteristics such as text type, topic, genre, lexical density, syntactic complexity, semantic abstractness, complexity of structure sentence length also affect text comprehensibility (Pearson & Camperell, 1981, p. 33).For the role of vocabulary in reading, there is a figure that learners need to have minimum amount of vocabulary, about 3000 word families or 5000 lexical items in order to read effectively (Laufer,1997,p.25).In Chinese universities, teachers tend to emphasize developing students’linguistic schema by teaching vocabulary and grammar rather than formal and content schema, particularly the latter. Therefore, there is a must that instructors need to cover formal and content schema knowledge in reading instruction. Richards and Schmidt (2002, pp.193-194) define extensive reading as “…reading in quantity and in order to gain a general understanding of what is read”. It attempts to build up knowledge of vocabulary and structure, arouse interest in reading and develop good reading habits. Krashen’s input hypothesis (1982) also emphasized the value of extensive reading in reading instruction because of its sufficient comprehensible input and his reading hypothesis (1993) points out the positive effect of extensive reading on other skills like speaking, listening and writing and other abilities like reading comprehension and speed, vocabulary, grammar and spelling. This reading hypothesis has been supported by many researches (Mason & Krashen, 1997; Bell, 2001; Macalister, 2008) . Ozburn (1995) argues that the benefits of extensive reading can not be observed until the minimum of four months has passed. Therefore, educators should not give up extensive reading.The literature I reviewed all shed the light on the importance of reading in terms of intensive reading and extensive reading in language proficiency, and on the necessity that reading instruction should be taught blended with speaking, listening and writing since the integration can provide motivation and reinforce the general language development, but I also want to emphasize that the blend should be focused on reading itself in reading instruction.There is a great lack in how to integrate extensive reading in reading instruction and its assessment in a very detailed way that I need to keep close eyes to.

Reference

Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. New York, USA: Prentice Hall.