Revista Argentina de Clínica Psicológica 2020, Vol. XXIX, N°2, 1084-1091
DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2020.349 1084
P
SYCHOLOGICAL
B
ARRIERS OF
C
OLLEGE
S
TUDENTS IN
E
NGLISH
R
EADING
C
OMPREHENSION AND
C
OUNTERMEASURES
Yonggang Gao, Lu Gan
*Abstract
This paper aims to overcome the obstacles in teaching English reading comprehension at Chinese colleges. Firstly, the authors carried out a questionnaire survey on 288 college students and interviewed several respondents and 3 college English teachers. The survey data were analysed statistically on Excel, and the transcripts of the interviews were examined in details, revealing the current situation of college students in learning English reading comprehension. On this basis, the authors identified the obstacles in the learning process, found the causes, and designed a teaching strategy to cope with these obstacles. The results show that Chinese college students face both linguistic barriers (lexical, syntactic and discourse-stylistic barriers) and non-linguistic barriers (intellectual cognitive barrier, non-intellectual cognitive barrier, background barrier, linguistic sense barrier, reading purpose barrier, reading skill barrier and reading strategy barrier); these barriers are attributable to the defects in both teaching and learning of English reading comprehension; the college English teachers are advised to reform their teaching model to cope with the linguistic and non-linguistic psychological barriers of learning English reading comprehension. This research throws new light on the research of college English teaching and learning from psychological perspective.
Key words: English Reading, Vocabulary, Grammar, Background Knowledge, Reading Habits, Psychological Factors.
Received: 27-03-19 | Accepted: 14-10-19
INTRODUCTION
Reading, as one of the most basic language skills, is a combination of several different techniques. In other words, reading refers to the process in which the reader uses all the
necessary skills to complete “decoding”. Here,
the decoding means the auditory and visual stimulation by words and the transmission of the language information carried by words to the brain for memory, analysis and evaluation. Therefore, in reading, students must first understand the work and then solve key questions. It can be seen that reading involves the ability to understand and absorb written information, as well as a complex psychological
School of Foreign Languages, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China.
E-Mail: ganlu@cug.edu.cn
activity and a positive thinking and reasoning activity. Eddie Williams once defined that reading is the process by which a person looks at and understands the written words (Casanova, Garganta, Silva et al., 2013). Reading ability enhancement is the main task of college English teaching, which mainly refers to fast reading and accurate understanding. The College English Syllabus requires students to read 80 to 120 words per minute (wpm). At present, the average reading speed of British and Americans is 250 wpm, with the accuracy rate of 70%, and that of a fast reader is as high as 500-600 wpm, even 700-800 wpm (Zhao & Zhang, 2018). In fact, the reading speed of college students in China is on average less than one-third of the average level of British and Americans. Obviously, poor reading ability is the main problem facing college English teaching at present. What hinders the improvement of students' reading ability? To answer this question, this paper investigated the
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obstacles in the learning process, identified the causes, and designed relevant teaching strategies.
OVERALL SURVEY DESIGN AND METHOD
Research question
Reading plays a particularly important role in English competence, and accounts for the largest proportion of English exams. To a certain extent, the score for reading comprehension questions is directly related to the total scores of an English test. Therefore, the cultivation of students' reading ability is the main task of college English teaching. As a foreign language, English learning contains four processes, namely recognition, transformation, synthesis and test, as shown in Figure 1. However, poor reading ability of students is currently the main problem facing college English teaching. This paper tried to alleviate this situation by identifying the obstacles and proposing the countermeasure.
Figure 1
.
English reading teaching process
Recognition
Media: English teacher, English-Chinese
dictionary
Conversion
Grammar
Check
Knowledge logic judgment
Synthesis
Target
Source
Research objects
A total of 288 students were randomly selected from a third-year university for investigation. These students all aged 20-23 have acquired certain vocabulary and grammar with reading experience, who can represent the typical dyslexia and demonstrate the obstacles that should be overcome in college English teaching and learning (Wall, Kwee, Mcdonald et al., 2014).
Research tools
The English Reading Comprehension Disorder Questionnaire consisted of two major parts, with a total of 36 close-ended questions in 10 aspects. The first part surveyed the linguistic barriers in vocabulary, syntax, discourse and style from 3 aspects of 11 obstacles (Mahlberg, 2006). The second part investigated the non-linguistic barriers in the cognitive psychology, intellectual factors, cognitive psychology, non-intellectual factors, background knowledge, language sense, reading purpose, reading skills from six aspects of 18 obstacles. The respondents were required to make a choice for each problem based on the actual situation, and complete the questionnaire within 10 minutes. As shown in Figure 2, the 36 obstacles in the questionnaire were set based on the factors affecting English reading comprehension and the actual problems in English reading and learning.
SURVEY RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
After the questionnaire was collected, the author checked and screened all the questionnaires, and deleted the questionnaires with incomplete data or incorrectly filled. Finally, 288 questionnaires were distributed, with 285 questionnaires collected and 260 identified as valid.
Figure 2
.
Questionnaire for College Students' English Reading Comprehension
College Students' English Reading Comprehension Di sorder Questionnaire
Vocabulary（1,2,3) Syntactic aspect
(4,5,6,7)
Di scourse and st yle (8,9,10,11)
Intellectual facto rs (12,13,14,15,16)
Non-int el lectual factors (17,18,19,20,21)
Background knowledge(22,23,24
) Non-li nguist ic barrier i nvestigati on
Motivat e and develop mot ivati on for student s to read
Guide students to posi tive att ri buti on
Opti mi ze teaching met hods to enable students to
self-read Linguisti c disorder i nvestigati on
Readi ng ski lls (25,26,27,28,29)
PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS OF COLLEGE STUDENTS IN ENGLISH READING COMPREHENSION AND COUNTERMEASURES 1086
Figure 3
.
Answers of questionnaire
1. The article is difficult to understand.
2. I don' t want to read it anymore.
3. There are new words, you can
guess.
4.The meaning of a sentence without
knowing the structure.
5. I don't know which part to
modify.
6. Easy to cause misunderstanding, affecting the speed and effectiveness of
reading.
7. Influence the correct understanding of the
article.
8.Can not understand the deep meaning of
the sentence.
9. Can' t grasp the supporting
sentence.
10.Understand its causal or logical
relationship.
11. The difficulties encountered are
different.
12.Can' t read it.
13. Forgot the previous information
14. Ambiguity in
syntactic
15.imagine the situation described in the
language when reading.
25.Guess the meaning of
words.
26. Cannot find the topic sentence of
27. Forecast the content
below
28. Identify important grammar and punctuation. Lexical disorder
Syntax disorder
Discourse stylistic barriers
Intellectual factors
Reading skills
Answer
Questionaire
16.Think of other things from this place.
29. Not good at skimming,
reading
The interviews were conducted in the form of a one-on-one conversation in a friendly and formal way. Teachers and students can easily express their opinions and tell about the actual problems in reading. The interviews were arranged after class and recorded in written. Each lasted 10 minutes for students and teachers respectively. As shown in Figure 3, the answers of the questions were scored differently.
The EXCEL statistical software for WINDDOWS was adopted in this paper to record, sort and analyze the data collected by the questionnaire, and to conduct a qualitative analysis of the interview records.
Language barrier
(1)Lexical disorder. The data in Table 1 indicate that college students have obstacles in vocabulary. Specifically, there are three obstacles in vocabulary: 82% of students can hardly understand the text when encountering many new words; 73% of students are reluctant to read further when they encounter many new words; 77% of students think they can guess the meaning of new words. The number of students with Obstacle 1 is the highest of
235, which accounts for the largest proportion, followed by students with obstacles 2 and 3, both exceeding 70%, indicating that vocabulary is the primary factor affecting English reading comprehension. Insufficient vocabulary is a big obstacle for students who are not good at dealing with new words in reading.
Table 1.
Lexical barriers
Obstacle 1 2 3
Number of people selected 235 210 222 Proportion 0.82 0.73 0.77
(2) Syntax disorder. The data in Table 2 indicate that college students face obstacles in the syntax. Specifically, there are four sub-obstacles in syntax: 66% of students cannot clearly understand the sentence structure and meaning when reading long sentences; 62% of students cannot clarify the modified parts in compound sentences and thus are unable to understand the meaning; 71% of the students are confused about the various demonstrative pronouns, omissions, flips and other fixed sentence structures in the sentence, which is easy to cause misunderstanding and affect the
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speed and effectiveness of reading.;61% of students can easily misunderstand the text with multiple tenses. The proportion of these four obstacles exceeds 60%, indicating that students' grammar knowledge in English sentence structure and tense is not perfect enough, leading to considerable obstacles (Chow, Marascalchi, Abrams et al., 2019).
Table 2.
Syntactic barriers
Obstacle 4 5 6 7
Number of people selected 189 178 205 175 Proportion 0.66 0.62 0.71 0.61
(3) Discourse and stylistic barriers. The data in Table 3 indicate obstacles in the discourse and style for college students. Specifically, there are four kinds of obstacles: 66% of students often only understand the literal meaning of the sentence when reading, but not the connotation; 70% of the students can basically understand the meaning of the discourse or paragraph, but often cannot grasp the supporting sentence; 56% of students do not understand their causal or logical relationship for contextual connection; 83% of the students encounter different problems in reading articles of different styles or themes. The proportion of Obstacle 11 is the highest, which indicates that the style of discourse have hinders reading more seriously than the other three obstacles (Figure 4).
Table 3.
Discourse and stylistic barriers
Obstacle 8 9 10 11
Number of people selected 189 201 160 217 Proportion 0.66 0.70 0.56 0.83
Figure 4
.
Percentages of three linguistic
barriers
Non-verbal barriers
(1) Cognitive psychology - obstacles in intellectual factors. The data in Table 4 show that college students have obstacles in cognitive psychology among intellectual factors, specifically reflected in the following five aspects. 56.7% of the students can't concentrate on reading, and don't know what to read or can't read, indicating that more than half of the students have reading attention disorder; 43.8% of the students often forget the previous text in reading, indicating memory issues of nearly half of the students; 60.2% of the students cannot tell ambiguity in chapter comprehension due to the differences in thinking patterns between English and Chinese, indicating that the proportion of students with thinking model obstacle is the highest; 34.7% of students can hardly imagine the situation described in the text, indicating that a considerable number of students have an imaginary obstacle; 54.6% of students find it difficult to apply their own knowledge and experience to the understanding of the content, or to reason about other things, indicating that more than half of the students have the reading disorder.
Table 4.
Obstacles in intellectual factors
Obstacle 12 13 14 15 16
Number of people
selected 147 112 156 90 142 Proportion 0.56 0.43 0.60 0.34 0.54
(2) Cognitive psychology - obstacles in non-intellectual factors. The data in Table 5 indicate that college students have obstacles in cognitive psychology among non-intellectual factors. 61. 92% of students often feel no motivation or need for reading; 51.5% of students do not like reading English and thus cannot be absorbed in reading for accurate understanding; 79.6% of students often actively start reading but cannot persist when they encounter difficulties in reading; 40.7% of students often feel nervous and anxious about reading, thus hindering the smooth reception of linguistic information; 41.5% of students often lack confidence in their reading ability and are unwilling to read, which affects the understanding of the article. Among them, the proportions of obstacles 17, 18, 19 are all more than half, which indicates that students' reading motivation, interest, willingness, attitude and habits are relatively bigger problems in reading. The teacher-student relationship still occupies a considerable proportion though it takes up the smallest.
0 50 100 150 200 2501 2
3
4
5
6 7 8 9 10
Language barrier
PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS OF COLLEGE STUDENTS IN ENGLISH READING COMPREHENSION AND COUNTERMEASURES 1088
Table 5.
Obstacles in non-intellectual factors
Obstacle 17 18 19 20 21
Number of people
selected 161 133 207 105 60 Proportion 0.61 0.51 0.79 0.40 0.41
(3) Obstacles in background knowledge, language sense, and reading purposes. The data in Table 6 show that college students have obstacles in background knowledge, language sense, and reading purpose. There are three obstacles: 69.3% of students are affected by foreign or domestic cultural background related to the content of the article, affecting the understanding in reading; 62.3% of the students lack the sense of language in reading and have to pay excessive attention to identify the vocabulary and other language aspects, making them unable to focus on understanding of the overall meaning of the text and reducing the efficiency of reading comprehension; 81.1% of students often have no or unclear purpose in reading, either for completing the task assigned by teachers or for entertainment. The proportions of the three obstacles all exceed 60%, indicating that students have considerable obstacles in background knowledge, language sense, and reading purposes.
Table 6.
Obstacles in background knowledge,
language sense, and reading purposes
Obstacle 22 23 24
Number of people selected 180 162 211 Proportion 0.69 0.62 0.81
(4) Obstacles in reading skills. The data in Table 7 show that college students have obstacles in reading skills. Specifically, there are five kinds of obstacles: 69.3% of students encounter new words when
reading, and are not good at guessing the words’
meanings in the context; 62.3% of students are poor at anticipating the following content according to the above text or cannot predict the following text accurately; 76.5% of the students cannot find the keywords in the sentence, or identify important grammar and punctuation clues; 76.1% of the students cannot identify the topic sentence of the paragraph or judge the relationship between the sentences in the paragraph when reading; 64.2% of the students are not good at skimming. As shown in Figure 5, the proportion of all five obstacles exceeds 60%, indicating that poor reading skills are relatively a major obstacle for college students' English reading comprehension.
Table 7.
Obstacles in reading skills
Obstacle 25 26 27 28 29
Number of people
selected 180 162 196 190 167 Proportion 0.69 0.62 0.76 0.76 0.64
Figure 5
.
Proportions of four non-linguistic
barriers
TEACHING STRATEGIES
In view of the obstacles that students have in reading comprehension, as shown in Figure 6, the following countermeasures can be taken in teaching.
Figure 6
.
Seven dyslexia analysis charts
Introduce vocabulary learning strategies and enrich vocabulary
(1) Teach students to classify words. Teachers can inform students of different mastery of words, some for reading only and some for written use. For the former, students can just recognize and understand when they encounter the words in reading or listening, while for the latter, students have to learn how to use them in writing also. Teachers can help students with proper classification of words
0 50 100 150 200 2501 2
3 4
5
6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18
Nonverbal barrier
Intellectual factor Non-intelligent factor
Background knowledge, language sense, reading purpose Reading skills
0.00 50.00 100.00 150.00 200.00 250.00 Lexical barriers
Syntactic barriers
Discourse and stylistic barriers
Intellectual factor Non-intelligent factor
Background knowledge, language sense, reading purpose
Reading skills
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Figure 7
. Basic strategies to improve college’s students reading skills
Introduce vocabulary learning strategies and expand enrichment vocabulary
Expanding knowledge through multiple channels and shortening the gap in cultural understanding
Strengthen reading skills training and cultivate good reading habits
Grasping the attitude of the author Judging the meaning of words according to
context
1. Recited dictation 2. Word formation 3.Vocabulary induction
Teaching students to distinguish between primary and secondary,
uneven use of strength
Introduce student s t o the strategy of remembering words Making judgments and
reasoning
Skimming and Scanning
according to the requirements of the syllabus (Li & Fang, 2017).
(2)Introduce students to the strategy of memorizing words
1) Recitation and dictation: Teachers can collect new words learned in intensive and extensive reading courses, grammar courses, listening classes, etc., and teach students the pronunciation and spelling rules. For repeated memorization, teachers can arrange weekly dictation for students to deepen memory until they are proficient in the usage of words.
2) Word formation: Many of English words are compounds, and contain a basic part for the meaning plus different prefixes and suffixes to form a new vocabulary with different semantics and functions. Memorizing words by word formation enables students to achieve double results with only half the effort.
3)Vocabulary induction: Students can be taught to induct terms to associate, activate and retrieve words stored in the mental library.
Enrich knowledge through multiple channels and shorten the gap in cultural understanding
Since the narrow knowledge often affects the reader's understanding of the text, we must
emphasize the students' absorption of various knowledge in teaching. In the classroom, teachers will encounter content related to background knowledge, such as famous person, locations, historical events, popular science knowledge, customs, etc., and should introduce and explain them to students as much as possible to deepen students' memory through questions, discussion, retelling and notes. In extracurricular time, students should be required to read the specified materials and make full use of the library to browse newspapers and magazines, read the Bible, foreign celebrity quotes and folktales, and touch on current affairs, music, dance, sports, art, health care and other knowledge in common sense (Arigo, Rohde, Shaw et al., 2017). Additionally, students should communicate with and learn from each other. As shown in Figure 7, through multi-channel and all-round learning, students will be well-versed in reading activities, and can easily and accurately understand the text.
Strengthen reading skills training and cultivate good reading habits
In order to correct students' study habits, teachers should impart students reading skills in stages.
PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS OF COLLEGE STUDENTS IN ENGLISH READING COMPREHENSION AND COUNTERMEASURES 1090
(1) Skimming and Scanning. Skimming and scanning are effective ways to read quickly. The skimming method should be applied to materials with only a few new words and familiar to students. Students can quickly scan the full text to initially understand the context and the author's writing intentions, and then master the idea of full text. It is to cultivate an important skill of students to focus on topic sentences. The scanning rule is a method used for materials with more difficult content and more vocabulary. Students can first check the exercises in the back of the article, and then go back to read the article. This method allows students to quickly understand the requirements of each exercise and read with a targeted goal (Xie, Yang, & Liu, 2011; Xie, Yang, & Zeng, 2009). With the purpose of reading in mind, students can gradually scan the entire article at the speed of ten lines at one glance, and find the answers to each exercise, while skipping the content unrelated to the exercise, which will undoubtedly accelerate reading.
(2) Make judgments and reasoning. As the language often expresses beyond its literal meaning, students must learn how to judge and reason the text, to not only understand the literal meaning but also clarify the connotation implied in the context. Students must read carefully, accurately grasp the facts, follow the logical laws, and analyze to make correct judgments. At the same time, students should utilize the content clearly expressed in the article, such as syntax, logic, cultural elements and clues, to understand the meaning of the information and reason correctly and then to speculate the previous and predict the following. Only with the two abilities of judgment and reasoning, can students understand the meaning of the text that is not clearly expressed but implied, and achieve a thorough understanding.
Grasp the attitude of the author
Correct mastery of the author's views and attitudes is also an important reading ability. How does the author elaborate a question? Does he explicitly explain the problem or use a series of examples to elicit it? How does he express his point of view and come to a conclusion? Sometimes the author first introduces a point of view and then uses "yet" as the turning point to raise the opposite point of view, so the reader must relate the context for better understanding. Moreover, readers should clarify the author’s indication, a tendency or
prejudice, and his attitude, namely objective, critical, humorous or serious.
Judge the meaning of words according to context
Context refers to the meaning conveyed by the texts before or after one word, phrase or sentence. Experienced readers often guess the meaning of words according to the context based on their knowledge and experience. Sometimes the author will provide the clue for readers to understand the meaning. Additionally, inferring meaning from the context is not only an important reading skill, but also an important technique for exams. Specifically, the meaning of new words can be deducted by English symbols and lexical connections combined with common sense of science, life and logic based on the context-related information (Wu, Wang, Wu et al., 2018). In short, English reading comprehension has an extremely important position in students' English learning, and an obstacle for students to improve their English. We must constantly identify obstacles that hinder the improvement of reading comprehension ability, explore the countermeasures, and advance college English teaching.
CONCLUSION
Through the empirical research by
questionnaires and interviews of university students, this paper has identified the obstacles in the college English reading comprehension, and put forward corresponding effective teaching strategies. According to the research results, the author draws the following conclusions. There are linguistic barriers and non-linguistic barriers in college students' English reading comprehension. Among them, the linguistic barriers mainly include 11 obstacles in three aspects, namely three obstacles in the vocabulary, four obstacles in the syntactic aspect, and four obstacles in the discourse and stylistic aspects. Non-linguistic barriers refer to 18 obstacles in six aspects. These barriers are mainly attributed to the status quo and problems in the college English teaching and learning. To tackle these obstacles, this paper puts forward effective teaching strategies from three aspects, including changing teaching concepts and seeking effective teaching modes, teaching strategies for linguistic barriers in English reading, and teaching strategies for non-linguistic barriers in English reading comprehension. For the latter two, three and four specific methods are proposed respectively.
This paper was conducted based on the previous studies on barriers in the English reading comprehension, especially in the context of the lack
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of empirical research for university students, hoping to provide theoretical basis and data support for the improvement of English reading teaching in colleges and universities, and ultimately help college students to reduce obstacles in English reading comprehension and improve their reading ability.
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