An Analysis of Obstacles of High School Students’ English Reading Comprehension.doc

An Analysis of Obstacles of High School Students’ English Reading Comprehension I. Introduction According to the New English Curriculum Standards, high school graduates should achieve the Level Eight. As for reading, students should be able to “understand the different ideas and attitudes in reading materials, identify different features of literature type, analyze difficult and long sentences according to the sentence structure, appreciate easy literature with the help of teachers, acquire and tackle information from the Internet, and read extra-curriculum works to the amount of 360 thousand words at least”. But the situation of reading teaching in high schools seems to be depressing nowadays. Every week, there are only 5 classes. Students read only in the classroom, and after class, they seldom do so except for the homework. As a result, their reading speed is far behind the requirement and they are lacking in background knowledge of western countries. They lose their interest in reading because of their bad performance. Reading is a complicated process. It happens swiftly and secretly in human brain. So what factors may influence readers’ comprehension, especially high school students’ reading comprehension? To what extent do these factors affect them? Different experts have different ideas. Chen Xianchun holds the idea that the obstacles of English learners can be attributed to a small vocabulary, incoherent understanding and slow reading speed. Hu Chundong considers it from two aspects: direct and indirect. He thinks the obstacles include narrow eye span and slow brain reaction, regression, return sweep, utterance reading and figure-pointing reading, the attention, reading interests and so on. Wang Duqin proposes six factors influencing reading: background knowledge, vocabulary, sentence structure, reading strategies, interests, reading teaching. Zhu Chun analyzes this issue from six aspects: cognitive level, physical status, interests and character, social, e