Vocabulary is the basic element of language, while sentences are the basic structure to express meaning. Every article that students read is composed of sentences. Therefore, whether you can understand sentences and understand the logical relationship between sentences is the key to truly understand the article. In other words, reading ability is related to the size of vocabulary. Students should enlarge their vocabulary through word formation, including derivation, synthesis, conversion and prefix and suffix, and enrich and expand their vocabulary through extensive reading and frequent practice.

2. Cultivate good reading habits

Reading teaching plays a very important role in English teaching, and good reading habits are very important to improve reading ability. It is necessary to guide students to read more, read more and practice more through reading teaching based on students' practice, and cultivate students' reading habits. First of all, according to the teaching objectives, guide students to read a short article every day as required. Usually time is tight, reading is less, holidays are more, and reading is more. Over time, many a mickle makes a mickle. This can not only improve the repetition rate of the vocabulary learned, but also increase students' knowledge and cultivate their ability to think directly in English. Secondly, according to the teaching requirements, read the class carefully. The main teaching goal of reading class is to cultivate students' reading ability. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to guide students to learn and master the vocabulary, sentence patterns, grammar, idioms and other language knowledge involved in the text content, and understand the cultural background involved in the text content, so as to improve the accuracy and depth of reading methods, reading speed, reading skills and reading comprehension. In teaching, we should try our best to combine in-class reading training with extracurricular reading guidance, and combine in-class intensive reading with extracurricular extensive reading to gradually form good reading habits.

3. Master effective reading methods

The common methods of English reading are as follows:

(1) Guess the meaning of the word

In the process of reading, we will inevitably encounter new words. If we look them up in the dictionary or ignore them, it will affect our understanding of the article. Therefore, we can guess the meaning of the article by using the synonyms and antonyms in the context, guess the meaning according to the meaning of the whole sentence, and use the knowledge of grammar and word formation to help us understand the article.

(2) Skimming

Through the overall rough reading, we can understand the main idea of the content, which is helpful to understand and prepare for a careful understanding of the article. Look for the topic sentence, get the general idea and find out the theme of each paragraph. An article usually revolves around a center. In reading teaching, students should be consciously trained to find out the topic sentences and grasp the center, so that students can understand the relationship between the topic sentences and the specific facts and details of the article. For paragraphs without topic sentences, students should be guided to analyze, infer and summarize the general idea of the paragraph by relying on the cohesion and inter-sentence relationship in the paragraph, so as to achieve the purpose of overall understanding and obtain the correct information expressed in the article.

(3) Looking for reading

That is, quickly find some relevant information, such as year, name, location, number, etc. , so as to know fairly well and avoid talking about irrelevant content. The point is to get the information you want.

(4) Close reading

The so-called close reading means close reading sentence by sentence, grasping every detail, paying attention to the language structure, handling the language points, grasping the main facts and key information, and revealing the internal relationship of the article structure, which is helpful to deepen understanding. An article is an organic whole, paragraphs are closely related internally, and the content of each paragraph has a very important connection with the theme, so it is very important to understand the structure of the article for grasping the theme and general idea of the article.

(5) Learn more about the cultural background of English-speaking countries.

Cultural background knowledge plays a great role in correctly understanding the content of the article. Therefore, teachers should guide students to read more relevant books. Materials are the most reliable and abundant sources of cultural background knowledge, especially those with rich cultural content and short stories. At the same time, let students watch some English movies, especially short films about foreign cultures. In teaching, teachers should also guide students to learn languages from the accustomed British and American cultural background, otherwise the English students express will be nonstandard China English. In short, letting students know as much as possible about the cultural background of English-speaking countries is conducive to improving their English reading comprehension.