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The present study is intended to investigate the English reading difficuit
es of Chinese senior high school students. Though reading has been most em
phasized in the present English classroom, students'' general reading abili
ty is npt very satisfactory. It is hoped that study will provide some ped
agogical implications for the improvement of English teaching at the secon
dary level in our country.
Four hundred third year students in two of the best senior high schools, T
aipwi Municipal Chien-kwo Senior High School and Taipei Municipal First Gi
rl''s High School, served as subjects. Their English reading proficiency wa
s measured by translation followed by a written questionaire. All the rea
ding materials were drawn from the current English testbook series.
The results of the study show that students do have reading difficulties i
n the four aspects: vocabulary, phrase, syntax, and reference. Among them
, it is syntax that poses the biggest reading problem. The reading diffic
ulty of vocabulary includes unfamiliar words, substitutions for similarly-
shaped words, and inappropriate choice of lexical meanings. The reading d
ifficulty of phrase is ratjer simple, compared with the others. Unfamiliar
phrases, especially those whose meaning are not similar to those of indivi
dual words within the phrase, usually impede comprehersion. Syntactic diff
icu;ty is best represented by transformation. In the tierarchy of reading
difficulties, the first five are, in descending orders: Nominalization, Re
lative Pronoun Deletion, S-V Deletion, Relativisation and Adverbiaization.
Thus, teaching trandformational process to students without the linguistic
terminology is suggestws. STudemts have difficulties in identifying the r
eference of the pronoun, particulary in long or syntactically complex sent
ences. Besides the suggestions of teching focus on these specified readin
g difficulties, how to teach reading as an organized structure, not the la
nguage itself, is recommanded.
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