摘要
The traditional bottom-up approach of teaching reading has been popular in China's English classes for a long time. The result, however, is disappointing. Many non-English majors who have scored rather high at their CET Band 4 are still frustrated by their inefficiency in reading. The reason is that the traditional approach is based on a misconception of the nature of the text and of reading. A text is traditionally believed to contain all the information the writer intends to convey and reading is a passive and solitary activity in which readers follow a linear bottom-up process of decoding the individual written symbols. Research shows a text does not provide all the linguistic clues for readers to make sense of it and reading is an active thinking process. How much readers understand a text depends on how much they bring into it. Through a top-down information process, efficient readers use their background knowledge to help them comprehend the text. Reading is also a communication between the reader and the writer. It is high time that we adopted a sound teaching approach based on these new insights into reading. Special suggestions are made on how to implement the new approach.
传统的"自下而上"的阅读教学方法在国内大学英语教学中一直十分盛行,但效果却令人失望。传统观点认为文章里包含了作者想要传达的所有信息,阅读只是一种被动、孤立的活动。读者只需先识别单词就可以理解句子和文章。但研究表明,文章并没为读者提供阅读理解全部语言线索,阅读是一个积极的思维过程,对文章的理解程度取决于读者向文章中注入自己思想的能力。阅读效率高的人常使用"自上而下"的信息处理方法,充分利用自己的知识结构来帮助理解文章的内容,积极与作者交流思想。本文呼吁广大英语教师采用由这些发现而产生的科学的教学理论,并提出了如何实施新教学理论的具体建议。
