Abstract: Classroom teaching is the main way for students to learn English. But in senior high school, there are still many problems in English teaching, especially in reading and writing teaching. This paper will further explore the importance and methods of reading and writing. Keywords: reading and writing skills
Introduction: The course should be learner-centered, meaningful and functional. Usually, the course begins with finding out what students don't know. The operation of these courses is based on the assumption that students lack a lot of information, and teachers and textbooks will have an impact on students. Teachers who hold this view think that students are like plants passively waiting to be fed and watered. But I think students should be regarded as explorers and active learners. They bring a lot to the learning process, and at the same time, when they develop new understanding, they draw nutrition from their environment. This basic principle will be used in reading and writing teaching.
The first part-how to teach reading
First, why teach reading?
Letting students read English texts is an important part of teachers' work for many reasons. First of all, many of them want to be able to read English texts, whether for their careers, for study or just for entertainment. Anything we can do to make their reading easier must be a good idea.
Reading texts provides a good model for English writing, and provides opportunities for learning language vocabulary, grammar, punctuation and methods of constructing sentences, paragraphs and texts. Finally, a good reading text can introduce interesting topics, stimulate discussion and stimulate imaginative responses, and become a springboard for a comprehensive and fascinating course.
Last but not least, students must read widely, because in their short life, only a small part of their knowledge about the world comes from other experiences.
Two. What kind of reading should students do?
When teachers give students reading lessons, they should pay attention to a balance-on the one hand, real English, on the other hand, students' ability and interest. There are some real written materials that beginners can understand to some extent: for example, menus, timetables, signs and basic instructions, which teachers can use when appropriate. But for longer essays, teachers can provide students with texts, which, like English, are still specially written or adapted for their level. Anyway, the material to be read should be interesting and meaningful. Teachers should better understand books written specifically for teenagers and deal with their problems.
Three. What are the principles behind reading teaching?
I) allow students to read.
No one learns to swim by practicing backstroke, fetching water or treading water by the swimming pool. However, in reading teaching, teachers often do this. Instead of letting students enter the "water", teachers let them stay in the skill book and learn the rules about the definition of letters, syllables or words, instead of letting them enter the book itself and immerse them in the author's language, because readers try to reconstruct written information.
Encourage students to react to the content of the reading text, not just to the language.
Of course, it is important to study the way in which language is used in reading texts, how many paragraphs they contain and how many times they use relative clauses. But the meaning and information of the text are more important. The main reason why teachers should help students understand reading is for them. They must have their own reading purpose, reading must be meaningful, and they must find a way to do something. They should be encouraged to reread or continue reading to gain meaning. But they must realize that the meaning lies not in the teacher, but in the interaction between the reader and the author. Students should be encouraged to ask themselves repeatedly: "Does this mean anything to me?" Students should be encouraged to refuse and tolerate meaningless reading materials.
Iii) Encourage students to guess or predict.
Readers' guesses or predictions are based on the information and syntactic structure they have accumulated during reading. Therefore, their guesses are often inconsistent with the materials. Students must realize that it is appropriate to take risks in reading; Using context to judge the meaning of words is a skillful reading strategy, and they have a sense of language to make appropriate guesses, which are in line with both the grammatical and semantic meanings of what they read.
Iv) Match tasks with topics
Once students have decided what kind of reading text to read, teachers need to choose good reading tasks-correct questions and useful puzzles, and so on. Asking boring and inappropriate questions will destroy the most interesting text; Through imaginative and challenging tasks, the most common articles can become very exciting. English teachers and students work in groups and take turns asking each other questions after reading. The teacher may ask, "What is the meaning of the character's age?" These questions need to be reasoned according to the details of the reading text.
The second part-how to teach writing (to cultivate the correctness of students' writing)
"Students learn to write by writing, and they learn to write correctly by writing, revising and proofreading their own works"-if necessary, they can get some help or guidance from teachers. They can't learn to write correctly by learning to write or doing exercise books that have nothing to do with their own writing. Therefore, the most important skill that teachers can use to guide students to write grammatically is to let them write and let them write something related to their own experiences. There is no limit to the types of articles that teachers can ask students to write. However, the teacher's decision should be based on how many languages students have mastered and what their interests are.
"I read a paper and ignore all punctuation marks. What's good for students?
We spend hours reading papers in the evening-I'm not sure the students learn as much from it as I spend on it. "
These comments on the process of correcting students' papers discussed by senior high school English teachers reflect the dissatisfaction and frustration of many teachers in dealing with the mistakes in students' writing, such as obvious mistakes in spelling and punctuation. Traditionally, teachers use two methods to correct mistakes: teaching grammar correctness by practicing grammar texts; By pointing out all the mistakes in students' papers.
Most students find that they will be very depressed if they get back a written homework full of red ink, underscores and strikeouts. This strongly shows that their written English is very poor. Of course, some written assignments are full of mistakes, but even in these cases, teachers must strike a balance between accuracy and truth and treating students sensitively and sympathetically.
Some skills can be used to deal with mistakes in students' papers:
I) selectivity
In response to students' writing, teachers are encouraged to adopt a gentler method to deal with mistakes instead of intensive error correction. If teachers correct students' mistakes too much, students may focus on their mistakes instead of their ideas. When the teacher's main purpose in reading students' papers is to respond to the content, students are more likely to grow into writers. However, if the attention to content and correctness is combined when writing a paper, it is more helpful to choose one or two mistakes that individual students are making than to point out every mistake in the paper. The teacher can identify a selected mistake, show one or two examples on the students' test paper, or explain the correct form, or guide the students to make further explanations in the manual. It is always worthwhile to write a comment at the end of a written work-from "well done" to "this is a good story, but you must check your use of the past tense again-see X Grammar Book, page xx."
2) Error analysis
Another way to deal with students' mistakes, which is particularly effective for teachers, is to deal with them from an analytical perspective. Teachers, as error analysts, look for the patterns of individual students' errors and try to analyze errors (lack of knowledge about a grammar point; A careless or a wrong learning rule? ) and plan the strategy accordingly.
Iii) publishing students' works
The last basic strategy is publishing. Students need a reason to scrutinize a draft until it is perfect; The strong desire to see yourself published will become a powerful driving force for revision and proofreading.
Conclusion: As teachers of high school students, they should learn to shift their efforts to support the language advantages that students already have, so that students can have a sense of success. Finding materials and planning classroom experience will stimulate students' reading and writing, which will be easier to develop than now.
Reference:
Gu Xueliang, Basic Skills Training in English Teaching, Hangzhou University Press, 1998.
Wilga m. Rivers & amp Practical Guide to Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, new york: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Understanding Reading (2nd Edition), new york: Holt, Reinhart and Winston Publishing House, 1978.
David Freeman & The Road to Language Success, new york: Oxford University Press.