赵凌
（天水师范学院，甘肃 天水 741001）
【摘 要】英语泛读课程在英语语言教学过程中处于一个非常重要的位置。作为英语语言知识的输入媒介直接影响着英语学习者的知识获取和语言素质培养。笔者分析了国内高校英语专业学生普遍使用的《英语泛读教程》来说明该课程对英语专业学生英语学习的影响。
教育期刊网 http://www.jyqkw.com
关键词 英语学习；英语专业；泛读教材；分析
Evaluation of English Extensive Reading Textbook
ZHAO Ling
（Tianshui Normal University, Tianshui Gansu 741001, China）
【Abstract】English Extensive Reading textbook plays a crucial role in Chinese English majors English language acquisition. It directly influences English language learners knowledge input. In this paper, the author analyzed the Extensive Reading textbook in order to illustrate how it will effect Chinese English majors learning.
【Key words】English；English majors；Entensive reading；Analyze
0 Introduction
The textbook evaluated in this assignment is Extensive Reading (book 1 by Liu Naiyin, 2005, second edition). This textbook is sponsored by Education Department of China, and is widely used as a coursebook of extensive reading for English majors(usually first and second year students).
According to the author, this textbook has the following features:
（1）The materials of reading touches upon society, politics, economics and culture of English-speaking countries; the content is up to date and includes new social developments and scientific and technological developments, and it focus on interests and variable genres.
（2）The reading material varies from 1200 words to 2400 words, which is a breakthrough of traditional extensive reading books. This increasing of words can help students enlarge their vocabulary through reading, upgrade their reading speed and comprehending ability.
（3）The reading material highlights the aim of training students’ abilities to acquire information and text thesis statement quickly, accurately and effectively.
This text book consists of 15 units, each unit falls into 4 parts:
（1）Text. In this part there is a text about 1200-2000 words, students are required to read the text and do the following exercises. The exercises are multiple-choice questions set for testing students’ abilities of getting the main idea of the text, comprehending the text, discussing in class and vocabulary exercises.
（2）Reading skills. In this part, various reading skills are introduced, and, accordingly, specially designed exercises are followed. (This part is not provided in unit 3, 6, 9, 12 and 15)
（3）Testing. In this part, three short passages of about 100-300 words are provided. Students are to read the passages quickly and note down the time of reading each passage. Each passage is followed by 5 multiple-choice questions to examine students’ comprehending.
（4）Home reading. In this part, a passage of similar length of the text in part one is provided for students to read after class. Exercises of multiple-choice questions are provided to examine students’ comprehending.
It is universally acknowledged that extensive reading, unlike intensive reading which focuses on grammar and complete comprehension of reading materials, aims at letting students read at leisure, at their own space and most importantly read for fun, in this process, students can cultivate themselves a native-like language environment, thus, promoting their reading ability. But in my teaching experience in my university, it is another story. In my curriculum, I have to teach extensive reading for a class twice a week. And the established practice in teaching extensive reading in my department, the first part--- text has to be taught just like the one of an intensive reading class. That means I have to explain every difficult points of the text: new words, difficult sentence structure and grammar and so forth. Usually, there is no time to do the following parts of the unit which are normally assigned to students as homework. And there are no contributive suggestions available in the according teacher’s book. Still, there is no way I can alter the course either in time table or the teaching procedure, because the syllabus of our university requires me to do so. That is how the extensive reading class is taught in my teaching practice.
1 Evaluation
According to Mckeachie (2002): ‘the major predictor of what students learn is not the teaching method but the textbook’. Textbooks are of great importance for both teachers to carry out their teaching activities and students to get a great access to information. When it comes to EFL learning, it is needless to say how important textbooks are. In China, Extensive reading is the textbook for English majors of first and second year across nearly all Chinese universities and colleges, if I may say, this book has a great influence on students’ cultivation of reading ability. I will evaluate this extensive reading book according to the textbook’s 5 parts: text, reading skills, testing and homereading and the according exercises.
（A）Text.
In this part students are given a passage about 1200-2000 words. In most cases, it is an excerpt from a native writer and the theme of the text touches on various aspects, like society, culture, literature, science and technology to name just a few. By all means, it is a hard nut to crack. For teachers, this text is even more difficult and complicated than an intensive reading text, and they do not know how to convey successfully the knowledge to students. For students, they have to look every new word up in dictionary to get a basic understanding for guessing word from context is not useful at all, because there are too many new words for a just enrolled student so many so that the words surrounding the unknown ones are unknown, too. So, I can say this text is not suitable to be conducted in class for first-first year students as extensive reading material. Then what is extensive reading? And what an extensive reading material should be? According to Davis (1995:329) (Cited from Renandya. 2007):
An extensive reading programme is a supplementary class library scheme, attached to an English course, in which pupils are given the time, encouragement, and materials to read pleasurably, at their own level, as many books as they can, without the pressures of testing or marks. Thus, pupils are competing only against themselves, and it is up to the teacher to provide the motivation and monitoring to ensure that the maximum number of books is being read in the time available. The watchwords are quantity and variety, rather than quality, so that books are selected for their attractiveness and relevance to the pupils’ lives, rather than for literary merit.
Similarly, ‘Wilhelm (2001) argues that text difficulty should be within students’ zone of proximal development; that is, they can read the text with assistance. But if the texts are within students’ zone of actual development or beyond their ZPD, readers may not read efficiently and critically since the former belongs to an independent reading level that is not challenging and thought provoking for readers and the latter is at students’ frustration reading level.’ (Cited from Reza Zabihi. 2011)
From the above we can see the text in this part of Extensive Reading goes to far for first-year students to engage in real extensive activities. Extensive reading should be a method to put students in a native-like environment, to let students dip into multiple language exposures. During extensive reading, students should read at their own space with the aim to develop a sense of language instead of focusing on new words, difficult sentence structures and grammar. Then what should an extensive reading text be? Using Krashen’s input theory, I can infer that while intensive reading adopts ‘i+1’ mode, then in extensive ‘students should be reading text at an i+1, i, or i-1 level, with i being their current proficiency level, and 1 referring to language features that are slightly above students’ competence.’ (Renandya. 2007). So, first, students’ current English proficiency should be taken into consideration. Students of first year of college, they just graduated from high school, and the English education they received is primarily on elementary one. They know less about academic reading, professional words. Sudden encountering with many big words will dismay them. The best way I think to alter this part is to use graded reading materials. The grading can be done according to TEM-4 (Test for English Majors Band 4). This is a Chinese national English proficiency test held in the second year of English majors. As mentioned above, this series of Extensive Reading textbooks are designed for the first and second year students. So we may just grade the texts of book 1 of TEM-1, book 2 of TEM-2, book 3 of TEM-3 and book 4 of TEM-4. By doing so, students can first easily adapt themselves to college level English study, and second prepare them for their professional examination. And most importantly they can have much easier comprehensible access towards extensive reading.
（B） Reading Skills.
This part provides various reading skills for students like previewing, guessing words form context, skimming and scanning and so on. There is no denying that reading skills are important. But as a book for English majors, only focusing on skills can not contribute much for students to improve their reading ability. Still, this way of teaching reading skills are not fruitful. To complete this part in order to help students develop themselves into competent readers, I think, it is a must to add reading strategies and cultivation metacognition awareness.
Let us first look at the definitions of skill, strategy and metacognition: skills tend to be simpler, smaller, more specific, more discrete; strategies tend to be larger, more complex, multi-step and involve the use of a number of skills; metacognition consists of knowledge of cognition and regulation and control of cognitive acts. Metacognitive knowledge (Flavel, 1982) consists of persons (interest, skills, knowledge), tasks (understanding nature and demand of task) and strategies (knowing the strategies for monitoring, repairing, and regulating reading process); metacognitive control (Flavel, 1982) consists of planning (setting purpose, selecting particular actions), monitoring (regulating and redirecting reading efforts to achieve goals) and evaluating (appraising effectiveness of strategies used). So, we can have a hierarchical relationship among skill, strategy and metacognition: metacognition can help students understand and acquire reading strategies which leads to a better use of skills. Therefore, the weakness of this part is obvious: only teaching students reading skills will not sufficiently enable them to use them correctly and effectively.
Then how do we make it a better part of this extensive reading textbook? My suggestion is that we could teach students useful reading strategies which consist of many different reading skills instead of reading skills only, at the same time, pay great attention to raise students’ metacognitive awareness. For example, we can in this part first introduce a global reading strategy like predicating, and then tell students the correct skills to be used like guessing new word’s meaning from context, inferring relative information from background knowledge etc. In this way, students will acquire not only learn and acquire the skills but also strategies, and gradually form a sense of how these learned strategies should be used in different situation, in other words, have a metacognition knowledge of strategies using.
（C） Testing.
In this part, students are given 3 short passages to read. Each passage is varies from 100-300 words. The aim of this testing is to examine the speed of student’ reading and how much students can understand the passages. Compared with the text of the first part of this textbook, the passages are easy-understanding ones because there are not many new words, difficult sentence structures and grammar. In my teaching experience, I often ask students to do this part in class. Most students can finish reading the passages around no more than 15 minutes and get most correct answers to the following multiple-choice questions. This is a really simple test, but for what? Recording the reading time of each passage of course is not the answer. It may be useful to have an overview of the time used in this part after the semester to see whether students will improve in reading speed or not. Its appearance seems abrupt and irrelevant with the other parts of a unit. The whole organization of a unit is discrete. One plausible explanation is possibly that it is a preparation for students for their TEM-4 examination. Because, in TEM-4, there is a similar part called ‘fast reading’ which requires students to read fast and get the most comprehension. This test-wise design, in my opinion, is not compatible with the nature of extensive reading. Because one point that extensive reading stresses is to let students read without pressure. My altering suggestion is to change this part into one with background knowledge connected to the main text of the first part. It could be an anecdote, a joke, a cross talk or anything that is interesting and pertaining to the text. In this way, students can not only read for fun, but also have a deeper understanding of the text, and this cultural accumulation is very helpful for their English acquisition.
（D） Homereading
The text in this part, according to the author, is related with the first part text. Under most circumstances, this part is often the continuing part of the first part. That means, students is given two long difficult texts to read. As I have stated above, students get not only a few problems in reading and comprehending the first part, it is just another boring text which they are so reluctant to do it. As often as not, I ask students to read it after class and check the answers in next class. Even so, students rarely tried to do it. They just noted down the answers.
By homereading, we mean it is kind of reading activity you can enjoy on a lovely day, or over a cup of coffee. In fact, students have to flip pages of a dictionary to get new words’ meaning, to look back at the first text to better his comprehension. It is more torture than enjoyment. Although, it is a good idea to stretch reading from only class to students’ life, it is hard to be put in practice. My idea of changing this part is either simply omit it or make it a practical one. If we do the latter, I think we can do it in two ways. First, we can change this part into a comparatively simple one. The text can be the ones closely related to students’ life or the ones they are interested in. There would be no questions. Students are only required to give a sharing presentation on what they have thought about the text, or what they have found interesting of the text, things like that. By doing this, students are not pressed anymore with the questions, they just read for sharing, as long as they indeed read, the aim is accomplished. Secondly, we can assign students no specific reading text for their homereading. We can ask them to read anything that is available at hand, and report what they read to the class. Nowadays, students are immersed into a digital era with abundant information. Anything they read from their computers, laptops, and smartphones can be considered as a homereading exercise. Similarly, there should be no questions, and possibly a sharing presentation. In this way students can read freely, widely and passionately. It is of great help for students to learn background information, up-to-date words and steep into various English reading environments, and that is what I think a homereading should be.
（E） Exercises.
Exercises are an essential part of an extensive reading textbook. They are effective ways of examining what students have understood the text of the textbook. Exercises are also a direct indicator how those ‘input’ get across to students.
Exercises here refer to all the exercises included in the first part (text), the second part (reading skills), the third part (testing) and the fourth part (homereading) of the textbook. The exercise of the first part of this textbook are: A. Determining the main idea; B. Comprehending the text; C. discussing the following topics and D. Understanding vocabulary. They are all multiple-choice questions except the ones of C. The exercises of the second part of this textbook are various in forms; they could be multiple-choice questions, blank-fillings and question-answerings, etc. The exercises of the third part of this textbook are all multiple-choice questions. The exercises of the fourth part of this textbook are: A. Comprehending the text. B. Disscussing the following topics. Every unit is of the same arrangement. From this structure I think it is far from being enough for an extensive reading textbook to evaluate what students will learn in this textbook. First, multiple-questions are used in nearly every part of the textbook. Though it is convenient to conduct, it is monotonous in form and it can not test students’ gain of the class comprehensibly. Because students will simply locate the part of the text that is pertaining to the question in order to get a correct answer instead of actual reading the text. That is not an extensive reading class for. Second, these exercises are all aimed to examine how students react to the given inputs, it ignores the output. According to the ‘output hypothesis’ (Merrill Swain. 1983), output is more important than input to learn and acquire language knowledge. Third, I think, reading skills can not be taught through exercises. It is an accumulating process of metacognitive awareness through reading. So, from the perspective of my view, I think, the exercises of this extensive reading textbook should be: first the ones can really serve extensive reading better; second, they should be combination of the input and the output; third, they should be helpful for students’ gradual development of metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and skills. For example, we could use presentation, text-retelling, role-play to add to the simple structure of the textbook’s exercises.
2 Conclusion
Extensive reading plays an important role in EFL study which has long been realized in Chinese English language teaching practice. Many researchers and institutions have conducted various studies to make it better. The prevailing usage of this textbook is one of their studies result. And they still have a long way to go. First, it is a preoccupied concept and tradition in Chinese education that a textbook should be academic and difficult. Students are not supposed to read in class with leisure and laughers. They should sit upright with their eyes wide open in the classroom and they should be busy with their homework after class. Second, it is too risky for universities and colleges to put extensive reading out of schedule to have students read at home or to have students read in class something not academic. Because students examinations result of CET and TEM will decide the ranking of the university or college. Third, teachers can not teach extensive reading as it should be taught. If the university principal passes an extensive reading class and sees the students read with smiles on their faces and the reading teacher were not instructing or writing on the blackboard, the teacher would surely be punished. These may count for why this extensive reading textbook is not a real extensive reading textbook. Nevertheless, these are all my personal and unprofessional understanding of the extensive reading textbook, and I believe a great change is being made possible as China becomes opener.
【References】
［1］Davis, C.ER: An Expensive Extravagance?[J]. ELT Journal,1995,49(4):329-36.
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［5］Reza Zabihi.An Investigation of Critical Reading in Reading Textbooks:A Qualitative Analysis[J]. International Education Studies,2011,4(3):80-87.
［6］Swain, M.The Output hypothesis: Just Speaking and Writing aren’t Enough[J]. Canadian Modern Language Review,1993,50:158-64.
［7］Wei Wu.An Investigation of the Nature and Functions of Exercises in textbooks for Intensive Reading Course for English Majors[J]. Journal of Language Teaching and Research,2011,2(5), 998-1008.
［8］Wilhelm, J.D.Improving comprehension with think-aloud strategies[M]. New York: Scholastic Inc.,2011.
［9］Willy A. Renandya.The Power of Extensive Reading[J]. RELC Journal, 2007，38(2)：133-149.
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