论文总字数：29457字

摘 要

众所周知,提高学生英语阅读技能是初中英语课堂教学的一个重要目标。因此，如何培养学生的英语阅读能力就显得尤为必要。有意义的语境有利于学生更好的理解英语阅读材料。很多中国学生由于缺乏文化背景知识而英语阅读能力低下，所以，为了提高学生阅读理解的水平，教师和学生都需要掌握语境理论。阅读理解的准确性依赖于语境分析。本文介绍了语境理论，探讨了语境的分类，同时也分析了其在中学英语阅读课堂教学中的应用。论文最后得出如下的结论：阅读教学中，在语境理论的指导下,教师可以帮助学生更好地减少阅读理解中的障碍。

关键词：语境；语境分析；阅读教学

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

3. Context Theory 3

3.1 Definition of Context 4

3.2 Classification of Context 4

4. Reading Teaching of Junior Middle School 5

4.1 A Brief Introduction of Reading 6

4.2 Models of Reading 6

4.3 Problems existing in Junior Middle School English Reading Teaching 7

5. The Application of Context Theory in the Teaching of Reading 9

5.1 Inferring the Meanings of New Words 9

5.2 Predicting the Content of Reading 9

5.3 Introducing Related Cultural Background Before Reading. 10

5.4 Understanding the life experience of the writer 10

5.5 Introducing the Structure of the Context 11

6. Conclusion 11

7. Works Cited 13

1. Introduction

English teaching, as a composition of junior middle school education, occupies the important position. Especially at present, English as an international language, has become a language skill that students must master. Reading teaching as one of the important ways to cultivate language sense and accumulate knowledge, although it is attached great importance in teaching, but the teaching effect is still not ideally. Thus, how to improve students reading ability is always an important topic focused by teachers and students.

Reading is an essential link in language teaching. But in the teaching of English, we often find that students are accustomed to reading word by word, sentence by sentence only for the literal meaning of words and they tend not to use context actively to mining the deep meaning of the text contained inside. As a result, students can’t really understand the meaning of the discourse. Under the influence of the traditional reading theory, English teaching in China has put too much emphasis on vocabulary and grammar in reading comprehension for a long time, regarding the vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar and language knowledge as the main learning objectives. Obviously, reading comprehension is not a one-to-one word meaning interpretation. It inevitably involves the questions of the choice of word meaning, situational knowledge, context and background knowledge, etc. in specific discourse.

Context is an important concept in linguistics. In general, the understanding of the reading text is the process of contextualizing. If you understand the context more, you explanation of the text is more secure. Contextual analysis can help students achieve effective reading by promoting and strengthening comprehension. If teachers can use contextual analysis consciously to develop the students’ context awareness, the reading teaching can be promoted.

In this thesis, the context theory and its application in junior middle school English teaching will be explored.

1. Literature Review

The context theory has become a hot subject of many linguists and scholars, since it was first put forward by Malinowski. They have proposed different conclusions from different perspectives.

In 1923, Malinowski B. first mentioned “context” in the article “The Meaning of Primitive Language” which is the additional recording of the article “The Meaning of Meaning". He distinguished context into two types: context of culture and context of situation. He believed that language was a kind of behavioral pattern, and context was essential to understand language. Malinowski’s view formed the foundation for the later development of context. Later In 1950, British linguist Firth inherited and developed the concept of context. He put that except for language"s context itself. He believed that language not only refers to the language environment, but also refers to the context of situation. He stated that context consisted of linguistic context and non-linguistic context (Firth, 1962). In the 1960s, Hymes, pushed forward the study of context of situation and made it a very important status. According to his theory, when people were in communication procession, the ability to generate correct utterances was important. Meanwhile, the competence to communicate with each other on the specific occasion to the purpose was also indispensable. And he also indicated that context and grammar must be constituent part of the speaker"s utterances in 1964. Systematic functional linguists represented by M.A.K. Halliday accepted the context theory of Malinowski and Firth, he put forward the concept of register, which refers to the language we write and speak would change along with the change of situation.

Like foreign linguists, many Chinese linguists and scholars also carried out many researches on context. Chinese linguists have begun to pay their attention to context research since the early 1930s. Chen Wangdao is a very famous linguist in China and he once stated in his work “On Rhetoric” that the context of situation consists of six factors, when, where, what, why, who, how(Chen Wangdao, 1979). This book has been thought highly of by Chinese linguists and regarded as the necessary and first book on context we read if we want to have a clear understanding on context theory in modern China (Wang Dechun, 1992). After Chen Wangdao, Wang Dechun put forward the new concept “the environment of language use” in the early l960s. To him context is the situation of using language, which includes objective factors such as time, place, occasions, etc. Hu Zhuang-lin has put forward his research findings in Discourse Cohesion and Coherence, in which he classifies context into three kinds: context of language, context of situation and context of culture (1994). Xiong Xueliang found that context mainly refers to cognitive context, including situational knowledge which accompanies with the language used (1996). Professor Gui Shichun thought that: “ The meaning of words is only to learned in the context (1987). If you want to remember the meaning, you must contact it in a variety of occasions, just like remembering a person’s face must see it from different angles.” Moreover, more linguists like Pei Wen, Zhang Zhigong and He Zhaoxiong also make some deep studies on context and proposed lots of useful viewpoints about context.

Although all of the linguists and scholars have their own viewpoints about context，but they all agree that context plays an very important role in understanding a text undoubtedly. The aim of all the researches and studies they made is to improve the reading ability of readers．

3. Context Theory

In recent English teaching, context has gradually attracted people’s attention. It not only brings benefits to improve the current English teaching, but also directly affects the acceptance and understanding level of students’ thinking on foreign culture. Context is an indispensable factor that teachers should consider in language use, any text is the product of a certain context. So the importance of context application should not be ignored.

3.1 Definition of Context

Since there are so many concepts of the term "context", how context is defined in linguistics is still a controversial problem, and it never reach a consistent view. In the field of linguistic, the definition of “context” varies according to different scholars from different schools. There isn’t a wildly accepted definition.

Generally speaking, context refers to the environment that language is used. In the particular language environment, a certain context can affect the expressions of the meaning of words, sentences, paragraphs or even texts. Some redefine “context” as following: context is the environment in which language is used and what is implied or related of non-linguistic knowledge belonging to the linguistic expressions in a language.

3.2 Classification of Context

Linguists have provided different points of view concerning the interpretation and classification of context. Although different linguists have different explanation and categories of context，the main purpose of context studies is to explore the relationship between meaning and context. Hallidy argues that context can be divided into two main kinds: linguistic context and non-linguistic context (1985). The linguistic context can be classified into three categories: lexical context, grammatical context and speech context. Situational context and cultural context are involved in the non-linguistic context.

3.2.1 Linguistic Context

Linguistic context refers to a language unit which expresses a certain meaning in the process of communication. The linguistic context can be classified into three categories: lexical context, grammatical context and speech context.

Lexical context mainly refers to the collocation of words. Also known as collocation context. Lexical context can promote the combination of words meaning. One word may have different meanings according to the collocations.

Grammatical context also called syntactic context. Because of the ambiguity of the words, the same word appears in different grammatical context showing different meanings.

The meaning of a word is not completely reflected in the dictionary, you can only rely on the context to clarify the exact meaning of a word. Because of the ambiguity of the words, the context seems to be more important. This kind of context called speech context. Because of a restriction function existing between words, the speech context can influence or even determine the meaning of a word.

3.2.2 Non-linguistic Context

Non-linguistic context refers to the extra-linguistic factors abstracted from the physical environment and cultural settings in which the utterance occurs. It affects the meaning of a word from all aspects, such as social background, language context, specific events and speech etc. In some occasions, a small language environment can not solve the problem, it must consider the great non-linguistic environment.

Situational context, mainly including environment and so on. The reader should assure that a discourse must be put in a particular context associated with the real world. The British linguist Lyons explains the situational context as some factors that influence the speech activities which are abstracted from the actual situation, including participants, occasions (time, place), degree of formality, speaking communicative media, topic or register. The speech act always occurs in certain situations, the information associated with the behavior of the characters, events, time, location and so on can help us determine the meaning of the utterance.

It is difficult for us to understand the true meaning of some words just according to the situational context and the linguistic context, it must be combined with certain social cultural background, that is cultural context. Cultural context refers to the the history of culture, custom, human feelings, values, social and cultural exchanges of the speech community that the speaker is in. There is an inseparable link between language and culture. They are interdependent, and interact each other.

4. Reading Teaching of Junior Middle School

Reading plays an important role in English learning. Reading class is not only reading, but also the comprehensive course of listening, speaking and writing skills. So the reading class is given priority to reading on the task of the comprehensive training of listening, speaking, reading and writing (Hu Zhuanglin, 1995).

4.1 A Brief Introduction of Reading

As we all know, reading is an extreme complex process of psychological and thinking activities, it is also a process in which human use wisdom to deal with the word meaning. At the same time, it is a process of combining the written information with the knowledge the reader have owned. In linguistic world, different scholars have different definitions of reading. Anderson is concerned, reading is an active, fluent process in which both reader and reading materials are involved in building meaning (Anderson, 2004). It means that readers have to interpret as much of the writers’ intended meaning from the linguistic symbols as possible. Which Day and Bamford thought that reading is the construction of meaning from a printed or written message (Wang Qiang, 2006:180). That is, readers have to extract meaningful information from the written language by connecting the text information with the readers’ own knowledge in the reading process. While Goodman put forward reading as a psychological word guessing game.

Based on the various views mentioned above, reading can be simply viewed as the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language.

4.2 Models of Reading

Reading comprehension is a complicated process. Additionally, the importance of reading cannot be stressed enough. The direction of the reading process can be divided into the bottom-up, the top-down and the interactive, students generally use bottom-up model in our country.

The bottom-up model is effective on identifying the literal meaning of a text via decoding words. The bottom-up approach to linguistic context, namely the knowledge of the language features and other details of the understanding, is a series of process from low to high, from the understanding of words and the final information. Chinese students generally adopts the bottom-up model, to solve the new words and read the text, and then analyze the grammatical structure and understand the meaning of the text. If you find the word meaning without the help of context and put it in the sentence, the meaning is not accurate and is still difficult to understand.

4.3 Problems existing in Junior Middle School English Reading Teaching

Although both teachers and students pay great attention to reading in the process of junior middle school English teaching, there are still many students with good vocabulary and grammar skills feel reading is very difficult. Both teachers and students have problems that they haven’t realized.

4.3.1 From the perspective of teachers

Firstly, Some teachers lack correctly positioning on the goals of reading teaching, they teach reading class as the language points class. Their teaching method is old and single, students feel boring and don’t have interests in reading, so it is difficult to improve their English reading ability. Secondly, they put too much attention to details and ignore the overall understanding of the reading materials. When students read the reading materials, only pay attention to the characters, events or circumstances, but don’t care about the theme of the article, paragraph structure and the intention of the author"s writing. Thirdly, in the teaching process, teachers are lack of guidance on reading strategies, the students do not know what kind of reading strategies can be used to capture useful information in the reading process, which hinders them to make the right judgment and reasoning. Last but not least, many teachers lack context concepts, so they don’t use context theory when they teach students how to read. As a result, students often can’t understand the real meaning of the text.

4.3.2 From the perspective of students

First, many students don’t have a correct reading concept. They form a relatively fixed mode of reading: words-sentences-grammar-translation, they often only focused on the learning of language knowledge like vocabulary and grammar. If there is no corresponding translation of words and sentences, they will have a sense of insecurity. But they don’t know, this kind of reading psychology hinders the development of reading ability, which can produce errors of reading concept. They may think that reading is just learning the knowledge such as vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure and rhetoric. The results not only lead to slow reading speed, but also can not grasp the lifeblood of the article. It is easy to ignore the overall meaning and lack of macro thinking ability of reading. This kind of idea is bound to affect reading effect.

Second, students’ reading habits are not very good. Due to the overall imbalance of education resources in our country, combined with the lack of effective English reading training system in junior middle school English teaching for a long time, many students has developed some inefficient or even wrong English reading habits from childhood. For example, in tests, we often encounter some students read aloud unconsciously when they are doing reading comprehension. This is what we call “ the sound of reading ”. Any other bad habits like heart reading, back to reading and so on. These bad reading habits, in turn, restrict the reading efficiency, which can lead to poor reading effect and hindering the development of English thinking. Some other students can’t read efficiently because they cannot concentrate. We can see everywhere some students wearing headphones or eating snacks while reading. Listening to the music and eating snacks is definitely greatly interfered with the readers’ attention on specificity, exactly the opposite of what we advocated efficient reading.

At last, students are lack of good reading skills and strategies. Reading skills are pointed to a variety of methods that each reader uses unconsciously in the actual process, and strategies are means and methods that teachers take in order to solve a particular problem. Middle school students in China are also formed certain skills in reading, but are often unconsciously without systematic training and they always have no special strategies. Especially the reasoning ability and the ability of summarizing and reorganizing the article are insufficient. It is difficult to grasp the whole idea of article while the students are reading.

The Application of Context Theory in the Teaching of Reading

As a teacher, we should make students realize the importance of using the context to solve the problem. Linguistic context can help the students in reading comprehension in the following:

5.1 Inferring the Meanings of New Words

Many students often complain that there are too many new words in reading materials, the most common way for students to get the meaning of new words is to search an dictionary or an electronic dictionary, which takes them too much time and energy. It is well-known to us that the vocabulary of English is very great, so we will inevitably meet some new words in the process of discourse reading. If every time a new word appears, you have to look up the dictionary, reading would be an extremely boring work. Finally, in fact, you might lose patience and interests. When readers meet words that they are not familiar, they can use the context to guess the meaning of new words. By studying the context to infer the meaning of a new word is a very useful reading skill. It can help us solve our problems, prevent us from spending too much time. At the same time, it can also help us learn more new words. Students should try to get rid of the habit of depending on the dictionary, and achieve the purpose of developing their ability of reasoning and thinking.

5.2 Predicting the Content of Reading

The reader sometimes stops to ask himself a question: what happens next when they are in reading and then they will find the answer which is based on the analysis of the former part of the material. There are two direct advantages of predicting. First, it can help you check and deepen your understanding of the text; second, it can improve your speed of reading. For example, when you read the first few lines of the article, you can guess what will happen next according to the given information. If the following text is right in your judgment, you will get more confidence and desire to continue; if it goes against your guess, you will try to find out what is wrong, and correct your mistakes, which may deepen your understanding of the text. The ability and habit of predicting for students are very useful, it must rely on the information provided by the context. In our teaching practice, we should not only make the students realize the importance of predicting, but also should teach them how to make good use of context.

5.3 Introducing Related Cultural Background Before Reading.

In the teaching practice, what teachers should do is to encourage students to expand their knowledge of the whole world, especially to understand the western customs, culture, historical anecdotes and habits so that the cultural differences between the East and the West will be reduced. Cultural differences is a serious barrier between Westerners and Chinese people to know each other well. To break the barrier, teachers should help students to expand their knowledge of the world, and students should read more books about west. However, it is not enough to master knowledge, they should also learn to get knowledge in reading comprehension. When they read a reading material, they should also learn how to get rid of the habit of the traditional Chinese learning, and make their reasoning standing in the Western culture background.

Only learn cultural knowledge from the teacher is not enough, the teacher should encourage students accumulate knowledge through reading newspapers, magazines and books. As a result, they will reduce the misunderstanding in reading and do better in reading with the foreign culture they know.

5.4 Understanding the life experience of the writer

In reading comprehension, we can not ignore the life experiences, beliefs, values and expectations of the writer. When a writer creates his work, he always tries to express a feeling or an opinion. Therefore, the key to the correct understanding of the writers" works is to grasp their standings and attitudes. When students begin to read some of the materials, they had better try to know the background of the writer, which will make them understand the work more deeply and more accurately. For example, when the students read Lamb’s “Dream Children”, the teacher could tell the life experience of Lamb to them, because only when the students know about his lonely and rough life, his deep feeling for his mad sister and his patient care for her, they will really deeply touched by the sad, moving sentimentalism of the works.

5.5 Introducing the Structure of the Context

We all know that westerners always emphasize reasoning and logic inference, therefore, the English texts are usually structured in a form of education and its main idea comes at the beginning of the topic with supporting materials following. On the contrary, the Chinese people’s emphasis is on abstract thinking, the most important part of Chinese text organized is delayed until a large number of background information materials has appeared. Students will meet much trouble in the interpretation of the English text without the information above. Specific aspects of the text structure, it is very natural for native speakers, however, it is a challenge for our students, because of huge differences of the thinking mode between westerners and easterners. Teachers should attach importance to the text structure analysis. The teacher should guide the students to divided the text into several parts, and then asked them what is the main ideas of each part, in this way, students will grasp the point of the text.

Conclusion

In this thesis, we mainly talk about the application of context in the teaching of English reading. Students are not limited to learning grammatical points any more. It will be a thoroughly new experience for them to associate the textbook with so much knowledge outside the textbook. Reading is not just the printed symbols recognition. It focuses on understanding. Context is an important and essential factor which calls for consideration. Only when you fully consider the contextual assumptions of both the writer and the reader himself, the reader can make his understanding adequately relevant to the text.

English reading teaching is a very practical activity that needs the support of related teaching theory and also requires teachers to explore. The students’ subjective efforts and the objective conditions are important factors that decide the quality of reading, but if there is no correct guidance of the teacher, it is still difficult to achieve success in reading even though he is an excellent student. Students who trained with context awareness by teachers can do better in reading exams.

According to the Systemic-Functional linguistics, context and text are very interdependent. Text exists within context, and context always accompanies text. Context is indispensable for the existence and comprehension of a text while a text provides indications for the contexts accompanying it. Therefore, the analysis of the text contributes to the comprehension of a text. Students who lack contextual knowledge, their reading ability is affected.

Through this thesis, we can draw a conclusion that context is very useful in reading. So we should be fully aware of the context and make full use of it in the middle school English reading class, teachers should penetrate the context knowledge to students in teaching, so as to improve the teaching effect.

Works Cited

[1] Anderson, N.J. Exploring Second Language Reading: Issues and Strategies. Beijing; Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2004

[2] Day, R.R. amp; Bamford, J. Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998

[3] Firth J．R．1930—1955，A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory．Firth J．R．(ed．)．1962，Studies in Linguistic Analysis．London：Basil Blaekwell，1-32

[4] Goodman K．S．1988，The Reading Process. Carrell P.L.Devine J．，Eskey D.E.(eds.). Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading．New York：Cambridge University Press，12

[5] Halliday M．A．K．，Hasan R．1985，Language，Context and Text：Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Victoria：Deakin University Press，12-58

[6] Hymes D. Foundations in Sociolinguistics. Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976.

[7] Lyons J. 1981，Language，Meaning and Context．Bungay：Fontana Paperbacks,201

[8] Malinowski B，1923，Some Modern Schools and Movements，Ogden C.K., Richards I.A. The Meaning of Meaning. London：Routledge and Kegan Paul,296-326

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