Psychological Barriers of College Students in English Reading Comprehension and Countermeasures

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.