非语言语境在中学英语阅读教学中的应用

 2023-06-07 09:06

论文总字数:33413字

摘 要

非语言语境理论在中学英语阅读教学中的应用,对提高中学生把握文章的准确性和激发他们学习英语的兴趣有着重要的意义。在综述非语言语境理论的基础上,本文首先阐述了当前中学英语阅读教学的现状,即:非语言语境理论应用不足;然后,重点探讨如何在读前、读中和读后运用非语言语境理论的三个方面:情景语境、文化语境和认知语境;最后,为中学英语教师在阅读教学中运用非语言语境提出相关建议。本文旨在为如何在中学英语阅读教学中运用非语言语境理论提供切实可行的方案。

关键词:非语言语境;阅读教学;中学英语 ;应用

Contents

1.Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

2.1 Related Studies in China 2

2.2 Related Studies Abroad 2

3. Non-linguistic Context Theory 3

4. Current Situation in English Reading Teaching in Junior Middle School 4

5. Application of Non-linguistic Context in Reading Teaching 5

5.1 Pre-reading and Non-linguistic Context 6

5.2 While-reading and Non-linguistic Context 8

5.3 Post-reading and Non-linguistic Context 11

6. Suggestions for Teachers in Application of Non-linguistic Context in Reading Teaching 13

7. Conclusion 13

Works Cited 15

1.Introduction

Reading teaching is of great importance in English teaching, and the cultivating of reading proficiency holds leading position in the cultivating of English application proficiency. English reading is an important means for acquiring English language knowledge, knowing the outside information and improving English language practice ability. Accompanied with the development of English teaching methodology, the research on English reading teaching is continually progressing.

However, the present situation of English reading teaching is not entirely satisfying. Most of the teachers still focus on traditional teaching methods with little use of application of non-linguistic context. The negative effect of lack of non-linguistic context is that students have difficulty in understanding text. From the perspective of long term, students will have no interest in language and culture.

With the recent development in linguistics, context theory has long been connected with reading teaching. Context can be divided into linguistic context and non-linguistic context. And the function of non-linguistic context theory in English reading teaching has been widely recognized.

Application of non-linguistic context in reading teaching is a kind of activity utilized widely in language. This is also one of the effective approaches to acquire information, broaden our view and enlarge knowledge as well as boost other language skills.

Application of non-linguistic context in reading teaching is effective in the middle school, which can improve the students’ reading comprehension and reading interests, and makes the learners study actively, which is very important because an active participation in class can be beneficial to the English learning. At the same time, it will enhance students’ confidence in study.

As we all know, the application of non-linguistic context is very useful in reading teaching. And thus, in the process of reading teaching, we should not only pay attention to linguistics context elements, but should also focus on the non-linguistics context. Only in this way could the students understand what they are reading exactly and deeply.

2. Literature Review

Application of non-linguistic context in reading teaching has gained great popularity and drawn much attention from the researchers and teachers homes and abroad with the development of linguistics. And many scholars have made various researches on it.

2.1 Related Studies in China

During the past decades, some researchers and instructors have carried out studies on the application of non-linguistic context in reading teaching in English classroom.

Li Li thought that the application of non-linguistic context is a highly valuable method to help learners to interact and guess the meaning in context. She also gave some suggestions on reading teaching. “We can make use of the specific location of situational context, such as the center of each sentence, the title of the article, the beginning and the end of the article, to guess the theme of the article” (Li Li, 2010: 127).

Guo Jia, in his paper The Non-linguistic Context and Reading Teaching in College analyzed how application of non-linguistic context in reading teaching interests and motivates the college students in a situational way. He indicated that it is quiet important to apply non-linguistic context in reading class and put forward several methods on how to apply non-linguistic context in reading teaching (Guo Ji, 2010: 154 ).

Other researchers such as Yan Mingzhou also have made a contribution to getting people familiar with the application of non-linguistic context in reading teaching ( Yan Mingzhou, 2012:48).

2.2 Related Studies Abroad

There are many researchers abroad who have been showing great interest in studying application of non-linguistic context in reading teaching concerning the concept, patterns, and characteristics.

Brown’s studies concerned about the application of non-linguistic context. He argued that non-linguistic context mainly involves “giving a role to one or more members of a group and assigning an objective or purpose that participants must accomplish” (Brown, 2002:103).

Cook Vivian discussed the significance of application of non-linguistic context in reading teaching. He said “non-linguistic context in reading teaching is very important in the communicative approach because they give students an opportunity to practice communicating in different social contexts” (Cook Vivian, 2000:146).

However, various as the researches are, seldom do the researchers focus on the application of non-linguistic context theory. And the overview on the studies about application of non-linguistic context in reading teaching at home and abroad displays a lack of systematicness and comprehensiveness.

In this paper, the author analyzes the application of non-linguistic context in reading teaching based on a case study, in order to compensate for the deficiency of predecessors.

3. Non-linguistic Context Theory

Context refers to the environment in which language is used. It is commonly believed that the term “context” was first put forward by Poland apologist and linguist Bronislaw Malinowski. He said, “in the reality of spoken or written languages, a word without linguistic context is mere figment and stands for nothing by itself, so in the reality of a spoken living tongue,the utterance has no meaning except in the context of situation”(Malinowski, 1930: 467). Context can influence the conveyance of meaning of words, sentences, paragraphs and even texts in the particular language environment.

Halliday critically inherited context theory of his tutor Firth, and divided the context into two categories, linguistic context and non-linguistic context. Linguistic context is further divided into phonetic context, lexical context, grammatical context, syntactic context and textual context. Non-linguistic context is further divided into situational context, cognitive context and cultural context.

Situational context is understood to be the physical, relatively easily identifiable level related to such factors as whom the participants are, and what the relationship is between them. Thus they may be parents and children, friends, employers and employee, or strangers to each other.

Cultural context embraces the habits, customs, social behavior, knowledge, and assumptions associated with a group of texts. Culture consists of all the shared products of human society. This means material things such as ideas, customs, family patterns, languages. Generally speaking, culture refers to the entire way of life of a society. In a very sense our culture is part of who we are.

Cognitive context refers to the various factors that affect people’s intercourse cognition, such as their different experiences, beliefs, thoughts, values and expectations, etc. It consists of three kinds of information: logical information, encyclopedic information and lexical information. The former two kinds of information are gradually formed in people’s mind though a long time of accumulation and the third kind is offered in the intercourse.

4. Current Situation in English Reading Teaching in Junior Middle School

Important as reading teaching is, the present situation of English reading teaching is not entirely satisfying. Actually, under the pressure of the college entrance examination for decades of years, the teaching of reading in China still focus on the impartment of information from teachers to students and most of the teachers still spend a lot of time in teaching grammar points with traditional teaching methods with little use of application of non-linguistic context. They always confuse the traditional PPP model (first,presentation;then,practice;at last,production) with the task-based teaching method.

In this way, what the students do in the class is not to “read” actively but “listen” to the teachers passively. It is difficult for students to express themselves even though they have a wealth of knowledge of the language. This is not very beneficial to cultivate students’ comprehensive capacity and conduce quality education. The result of the traditional method is that students have no enthusiasm and students only do rote memorization. Gradually they lost interest and then give up English when in the face of difficulties. Thus, they have a fear of learning English and lose confidence in English completely.

More often than not the teacher is confronted with a difficult situation where students fail to understand a sentence that contains no new words at all. Their difficulty in comprehension supposedly lies in their inability to understand the utterance-meaning determined by the non-linguistic context where the utterance occurs. Among the above reading difficulties, the most prominent problem is that many students only pay attention to the words at surface value through reading word by word and sentence by sentence, and can make full use of non-linguistic context. The result is that they can not understand the overall meaning of the article.

Under such circumstances the teacher may find it helpful to put the troublesome sentence in a relevant context of culture and of situation familiar to students.

5. Application of Non-linguistic Context in Reading Teaching

Reading teaching with linguistic context is just decoding the linguistic element, such as vocabulary, phrase, sentence, and the whole text, while reading teaching with non-linguistic context is a more complicated process. When we make use of the elements of non-linguistic context in the process of comprehending the reading material, we should be able to realize the elements, and even reconstruct the situational context or reproduce the cultural context. In the real reading teaching class, in order to implement reading teaching with non-linguistic context elements, we should make the students interact with the text to find out the non-linguistic elements, and interact with other students to enhance their understanding of the application of non-linguistic context and improve their “mutual knowledge”, as well as interact with the teacher to comprehend the methods of using non-linguistic element in comprehending the material.

According to the communicative approach, the teaching of reading is usually divided into three steps, pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading. Non-linguistic context in reading teaching can also be applied and interspersed in the three different forms of activities.

The following is a case study of applying non-linguistic context in reading teaching. The content is the reading part--Giant pandas, which is taken from Unit 5 Wild Animals with English 8A of junior middle school in Jiangsu. The content is science article about pandas. It’s helpful to enhance the students’ awareness of the need to protect giant pandas and other wild animals and try to live peacefully with the animals because we live in the same world.

5.1 Pre-reading and Non-linguistic Context

Pre-reading is a necessary preparation for a successful reading comprehension lesson, which means that the teacher gives appropriate import to students in reading practice as a guide. It not only naturally leads to the topic, but also to stimulate students’ interest and desire of knowledge, activation, and provide the necessary background knowledge for further reading so that students can make better preparations for reading. It is very important for a teacher to design pre-reading activities during reading class.

Pre-reading activities should be focused on input of situational context and cultural background knowledge. During the stage of pre-reading, students can be familiar with the text and learn the new words and phrases. Besides, it is designed to build background knowledge. Usually, teachers can show pictures or personal experience to introduce the topic and enlighten the useful words and phrases. Teachers can also conduct activities through games, brainstorming, and question-answer method.

5.1.1Guessing games

Firstly, the teacher naturally introduces the new lesson about background knowledge for the article and assists students to be familiar with materials. The background knowledge is also called unintuitive information stored in students’ long term memory, which has a direct impact on reading analysis and comprehension. Appropriate background knowledge can help students to remove the obstacles and problems that may arise in reading which can stimulate their desire to read.

At this stage, teachers can apply situational context to pre-reading activity to activate the reading interest of students and specifies reading requirements, purposes and effects. For example, the title of this article is “Giant pandas”, and the teacher can play a quiz game and put forward the following statements when introducing the theme: (1) It has a long neck and long legs. It feeds on leaves. (2) It jumps with its baby in his pocket. You can see it in Australia. (3) It is a sea animal and looks like a large fish. It is very clever and often plays some games for us in the zoo. (4) It is the largest animal on land and its nose is very long. (5) It is small and lovely, but has a long tail. It likes nuts. (6) They are beautiful black and white animals. They look like bears. They live only in China. Their favorite food is bamboo shoots and leaves. In this situational context of panda created by the teacher, students can naturally make full preparation for the following reading activities.During the situation of giant pandas, students will also develop the discussion on these statements in the form of group, which causes their attention.

5.1.2 Free talk

After students answer questions, the teacher can cause several relevant subjects by pictures and videos and trigger the discussion by two to three questions. Pictures and videos selected by teachers should involve topics that students like, and they can cause mostly open questions, trigger discussion and arouse interest easily. For example, students can participate in the discussion of this problem: Describe your favorite animal. Students participate in this activity by discussing, communicating and sharing with other classmates in accordance with their own knowledge and experience. These can help them memorize words and phrases needed in the process of main activities and learn some new words and phrases important for the completion of this topic.

Application of situational context in free talk is an opportunity to make classroom atmosphere more actively, broaden students’ horizons, and stimulate students’ interest in learning English. These can offer students the relevant background knowledge to help students predict the content.

5.2 While-reading and Non-linguistic Context

Due to the pre-reading, students could know about the topic of the text. Then the students go into the second stage. This phase mainly includes text input, memory and exploration. The essence of reading is the communication between readers and authors, during which students are the main part while the teacher is the instructor or supervisor. The way to input the text can be divided into fast reading and careful reading. At this stage, the teacher can apply situational and cognitive context reading activities to make students comprehend the text clearly and exactly.

5.2.1 Fast reading

Fast reading means that students can understand the main idea of the text in short time. In doing fast reading, students are not required to get to know every detail in the passage, but must read fast and finish reading in the required time. They should scan and skim for the needed information to answer the given questions. During fast reading, the teacher should ask students to grasp the main idea of the whole passage in a short time. In general, students would pay attention to the title, the key words, or the topic sentences of paragraphs.

In this lesson, students first have a fast reading, they are required to read the passage quickly, and answer two simple questions: (1) what is the name of the panda? (2) What will happen to giant pandas if we do nothing?

The above questions are not very difficult, students can get the main idea of the passage by skimming but not the details, and their overall reading comprehension ability can be improved.

For these questions, the teacher goes on applying situational context in this period to make students understand the main idea of the text. As we all know, students in Grade 8 still have great curiosity in animals. Some of them may have pets and are likely to link their own experience. At the same time, as China"s national treasure, panda is unique and students should have a certain cultural knowledge. Through the visual media, students know the current situation of pandas and the urgency of its protection. Then the presentation of Xi Wang’ pictures can catch students’ attention immediately. Students will be eager to learn about more information in the text. Naturally, students gradually throw themselves into reading activities.

5.2.2 Careful reading

Careful reading is a key part in reading class and can be segmented. It is necessary to understand the text surface information, but also a profound understanding of the text behind the information contained. The purpose is to make students read the text carefully to obtain detailed information. Through fast reading, students grasp the gist of the text. But during careful reading, students should not only grasp the main ideas, but also pay attention to the details involved in the text, especially the characters, time, place and plot, causal relationship, as well as the author’s attitudes, writing purpose.

In this lesson, the text can be divided into two parts. The first part is about the overall profile of the giant panda. The second is the problem the giant pandas may encounter when they live independently. Then the teacher can apply cognitive context in these parts to make students master the structure of the text. Then the teacher raises some deeper issues to let students read the text once again with problems. This time, students are required to do intensive reading and be able to divide paragraph of the text, clarify level and summarize the meaning of each paragraph, help students understand the meaning of the text effectively and gradually master task reading skills. For example, in this lesson, students will have the following task: read and match the part with the main idea.

Part 1 (para1-3) The problems Xi Wang may have in the future

Part 2 (para4) The actions we can take to protect the giant pandas

Part 3 (para5-6) The growth of Xi Wang

After finishing this task, students are familiar with the structure of the text, which is beneficial to further understanding about the text. After the short questioning, some short video material will be played to make the students get further understanding of the text. The comprehension exercise is also designed (either short answer questions or True or False statements) to check the detailed information about the text and review the information expression of the text.

Then, the teacher will ask students to read for details about Xi Wang by themselves. It includes: The weight of Xi Wang. Things she eats. The growth of Xi Wang. The problems of Xi Wang. During this period, the teacher and students analyze the text with various classroom activities, which can help the students have a better understanding of the reading material. At this stage, the teacher can organize grouping to communicate and discuss about the text to make students further understand deeply the content of the text in the course of discussion. If it appears that the student mastery of the text is not enough, we can also make them raise questions by themselves after communication and organize cross Qamp;A to find out all the issues.

The teacher wants students to use their own knowledge, interest and views to complete some communicative tasks and cultivate students to listen to others’ opinions. Guide students to express their own ideas in the form of discussion. For example, they can offer suggestion, make comment on the characters, and imagine all kinds of ends of the story. Then the teacher evaluates their work of course. Through group work students can perceive, experience and practice the target language in daily life. They receive and react to the information. In this phase, according to the cognitive context, it makes the article structure much clearer and the content much simpler. By finishing these questions, they mastered the main idea naturally.

Under the guidance of teachers, students read the whole text carefully to appreciate the article structure, relationships between paragraphs. Students can know the details better and get the further information about the text structure.

While reading, the application of situational context and cognitive context can trigger the reader to see more and more things, letting the reader have hundreds of imaginations and make thousands of inferences so that the reading can enrich their cognitive knowledge. And these imaginations, inferences and cognition are based on the shared knowledge and mutual manifest assumptions between the author and the reader. That is to say, in the reading process, the reader takes advantage of all kinds of his own memorized schematic knowledge to fully appreciate the literature works. The process is not just simply encoding and decoding, but is cognitive inference and complete comprehension. Reading comprehension is also a complicated cognitive process.

5.3 Post-reading and Non-linguistic Context

Post-reading activity in reading teaching is also an important part. The teacher can give some relevant keywords and content of the text or pictures as prompts, and require students to repeat the text according to the order of the original ideas and events, or rewrite the article.

There are some post-reading activities to enhance their understanding of the text as well as the cultural knowledge in relation to this topic. The stage can be also called language focus stage, which contains language analysis and practice. At this stage, the teacher can guide students to express their comprehended knowledge with their own words through the application of cultural context and cognitive context. On the occasion, teachers can invite students to discuss in groups, retell the text and finish the after-class practices.

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