Introduction

Reading ability is one of the communicative abilities; reading comprehension is based on a fluent and quick reading. The reading course for intermediate students select wide-ranging and practical written materials for reading training, in order to comprehensively enhance students’ integrated Chinese reading comprehension ability. 

Aims and Tasks

The ultimate goal for reading teaching is to cultivate students’ information obtaining ability, and developing students’ Chinese reading comprehension ability is the main task of this course. It includes:

1. Being able to grasp key words and topic sentences

2. Being able to understand themes and main ideas of articles, being able to analyze the text structure

3.Being able to understand the opinions, attitudes and feelings of the author 

Contents and Requirements

The Reading Course for Intermediate Students is generally open for one academic year (2 class hours per week, counting as 2 credits).

1. Teaching Contents

1)  Word frequency

In reading teaching, the reoccurrence of new words in proper and different contexts is the best way for vocabulary acquisition.

2) Comprehension of context and sentences

Readers apply syntax and semantic strategies to sentence comprehension.

3)  Text comprehension

The strategies of text comprehension consist two layers: the macro and the micro. Macro strategies including strategies of structure, background, culture and title. And micro strategies including strategies of detail omitting, key words, summary and inference .

2. Requirements

1.Increase students’ reading speed.

2.Enlarge students’ reading quantity. With repeated recognition in plenty of contexts, words, grammar points and cultural knowledge will be strengthened and systematic.

3.Focus on different focal points during different training phrases, in order to give consideration to both language knowledge accumulation and information acquisition. 

Teaching Steps and Methods

· Teaching steps

1. Introduction of topics of reading teaching.

2. Learning new lessons

1) Teaching lesson texts

Firstly, the teacher leads students back to the related part of the reading materials to have a detailed reading when students meet up with some difficult problems in exercises. Secondly, it is highly important for the teacher to give explanations to the questions before reading. Finally, after finishing the exercises, the teacher should instruct students to make a correct judgment of the text and a fair evaluation of their own comprehension level.

2) Skill training

In the reading course, explanations to reading skills are expectedly simple and direct, costing little time, as the detailed reading course has already well explained them before.

3.Summary and assigning homework 

· Teaching methods

1. Begin with the simple, then the difficult; begin with listening, then reading. Begin with words, then whole texts; begin with detailed reading, then extensive reading.

2. Begin with comprehension, then speeding up.

Test for the Intermediate Reading Course

1. Test principle: Mainly to test students’ basic reading ability and level; to test students’ comprehension of all kinds of knowledge according to different kinds of articles. The test items are mainly about the content of the course.

1) Blank filling, summary retelling

2) True or False

3) Multiple Choice

4) Answering question

2.  Test form

Prepare two equal-level test papers, A and B, and randomly choose one before the test.

3.  Evaluation methods

Marks of each part will be given according to the criterion of the test mark sheet, and the final score comes from the marks’ combination according to a certain formula.