朗读在外语教学和测试中的作用

Oral reading in language teaching and testing

本文评述了外语学习、外语测试等领域中有关朗读的研究，提出朗读是一个有着复杂心理、生理变化的人类驾驭语言的过程，外语学习者的朗读行为是其外语语言能力的一个表现。本研究还设计了一个小规模的实验．收集了10名大学生的朗读录音，并进行了转写、标注和分析。数据表明，朗读涉及语言能力的各个层面——语音语调、词汇、句法处理、句子及篇章的理解能力等。如果使用恰当，朗读可以作为学习者的外语语言能力测试的一种题型。

This paper, with a review of literature in two areas -- the application of reading aloud in language teaching and testing, proposes that performance on reading aloud involves a reader＇s perceptual, comprehending and production skills at different levels and therefore can serve as an indicator of EFL learners＇ overall language competence. To test the hypothesis, a small-scale experiment has been conducted with ten college students＇ oral reading recorded, transcribed, tagged and analyzed. The findings suggest that reading aloud represents a complicated, multifaceted performance that entails, for example, a reader＇s perceptual skill at automatically recognizing orthographical representations, unitizing those components into recognizable wholes and automatically accessing lexical representations, processing meaningful connections within and between sentences, relating text meaning to prior information, making inferences to supply missing information, and his production skill - the formulation and execution of speech plan, the performance on which, thus, characterizes the reader＇s overall language proficiency.