赵振国

上海杉达学院

作者简介：赵振国(1987 - )，男，汉族, 河南修武人，助教。研究方向: 语料库语言学与外语教学。

 

Abstract: Reading is a visual as well as a mental understanding process. Reading process can be divided into visual input process and mental understanding information process. Based on experts’ researches and theories, the author has analyzed the two reading processes and discover the main factors influencing the Chinese English learners’ reading rate are visual input with low speed and understanding information with low efficiency.

Key Words:  English reading; Obstacles 

 

1. Research Background

Reading is an important approach to acquiring information, so to a certain extent the reader’s speed and efficiency of reading English materials determine his abilities. It is necessary to study the factors involved in the reading process in order to understand how those factors affect the reading rate.

Reading is a process of seeing the visual symbols on the printed page and interpreting in the reader’s mind. In other words, as Chen Weiwei and Gu Lihong (2005) said, reading is a visual as well as a mentally understanding process.

So the author divides the reading process into two parts, namely, visual input process and mentally understanding information process. Based on those experts’ researches and theories, the author will analyze the three reading processes and try to discover the main factors influencing the Chinese English learners’ reading rate.

 

2. Two Bad Performance in the Visual Process of the Reading

1) Slow Eye Movements

   The physical factors involved in the visual process of the reading are the eye movements, including eye fixation and eye span. As Zhang Changsong (2005:1-2) said, in reading, an eye fixation is made when the reader’s eyes stop to focus on a word or a group of words. The eye span is the number of words the reader perceives during one eye fixation. The reader’s eye fixation and the eye span affect the reading rate. The more and longer the fixations are, the slower the reading rate will become.

2) Superfluous Vocal Movements

As Ma Jinhai(2003) said, it is enough for a reader to move his eyes from one word to another only with the muscles around his eyes, unrelated to the muscles in another parts. Superfluous physical activities will be worthless and slow down his reading rate.

Reading process is the process of a reader perceiving the information directly from his eyes, unrelated to vocal movements. As Zhang Changsong (2005:10) said, vocalization is that the reader moves his lips or whispers each word in the reading process. While the inner speaker will not pronounce any words, but just imagine the pronunciation or “whisper” words in his mind. His speech organs are at rest, but his inner voice actively repeats the words along the line of print. Both vocalization and inner speech indicate that the reader fixes on each word in the reading process. As we know, the rate at which a person can speak is seldom over 200 words per minute. The vocal movements would definitely slow down the reading rate to the speaking rate. 

 

3. Three Poor Performances in Understanding of the Essential Information

As Chen Weiwei and Gu Lihong (2005) said, the reading process actually is the comprehension process and the reading speed is the comprehension speed. Poor performance in understanding of the essential information will slow down the readers’ speed.

1) Poor Competence of Language Knowledge

Ma Xiaojun (2006) said that the reader starts reading by first decoding the words, combining their meanings to form phrases, then sentences, and finally constructing the meaning of the whole passage in a very linear manner. Responding to the reading steps of this model, the knowledge of words, grammar will become necessities. The reader's poor mastery of language knowledge will hinder the reading comprehension process.

2) Negative Transfer

According to Dai Weidong (2001), language is regarded as a kind of custom and learning foreign language means to study a set of custom. In the course of learning new custom, old custom (native language knowledge) will be inevitable to exert influence on the new custom (target language knowledge). The similarity between the native language and the target language will promote the target language’s learning, while the difference between them will make it hard to study the target language. The more differences the two languages have, the harder the target language learning task will become. This phenomenon that the old knowledge exerts influence on the new knowledge is called transfer. The transfer that promotes the new knowledge’s learning is called “positive transfer”, and the transfer that hinders the new knowledge’s learning is called “negative transfer”. Ma Jinhai (2003) has discovered that 51% of mistakes made by the students with Chinese as their native language in the process of learning English caused by the native language disturbance. So the difference between Chinese and English will hinder the reader’s comprehension in the process of reading.  

3) Lack of Culture and Social Background Knowledge

Wei Shaomin (2003) said, language is not isolated but a component of the nation’s culture as well as the carrier of it, the language reflects the nation’s characteristic, thinking mode, religions and so on. So lack of culture and social background knowledge will make the reader in trouble.

4) Translation in the Reading Process

As second language learners, we tend to translate the materials for a more thorough comprehension of it. The research done by Chen Weiwei and Gu Lihong (2005) shows that above 76.53% of students read and translate simultaneously in the reading process which means they will spend two or three times more than the normal reader to read the same material, so their reading speed will be far slower than others. Those students’ reading process is eye movements, translation (English material to Chinese meaning), and comprehension. The normal process is from eye movement to comprehension. From the above, those students have an additional process in the course of their reading, which will impede their reading speed.

 

4. Conclusion

Reading process can be divided into visual input process and mentally understanding information process. Based on those experts’ researches and theories, the author has discovered the main factors influencing the Chinese English learners’ reading rate are visual input with low speed and understanding information with low efficiency. The author hopes that this thesis can provide some aids to help improve the Chinese English learners’ reading speed by discovering the factors decelerating the reading speed. 

 

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