추론을 통한 영어읽기 능력향상을 위한 교수기법에 관한 연구

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate reading comprehension through inference to establish effective ways of teaching English reading comprehension. To achieve this purpose, this four components of reading comprehension related to inference were studied by adopting some scholar's classification. They are ; unfamiliar words in contexts, anaphoric relations, the relations between main idea and details, and figurative language. The effective ways to instruct reading comprehension through inferences are as follows. (1) English teachers should instruct reading comprehension by exercises which predict or infer unfamiliar words in contexts. Therefore, they should let students infer unfamiliar words by devices such as definition, example, synonyms and antonyms, comparison and contract, cause and effect, experience, summary, sentence structure and meaning, etc. (2) The teachers need to help students identify the referents from the linguistic contexts or the non-linguistic situations. The teacher's Questions can be used in written or oral exercises to allow students to practice relating anaphoras to their antecedents. Students should be instructed to understand anaphoric relations by making use of antecedent matching and anaphora substitution. (3) In teaching the relations between main idea and details, the teachers should instruct different places of a topic sentence which could be explicit or implicit. They should teach the various patterns of textual organization for students to identify topics, main ideas, related ideas, details, etc. (4) Students need to discriminate the differences in interpretation between a literal proposition and figurative statement. Teachers should be able to give figurative statements, and ask students to recognize the literal meaning of figurative language. They should make students compare metaphors and similes and generate a literal statement as many figurative statements. Furthermore, teachers should instruct tones to understand a variety of purposes of text. By teaching of reading comprehension through inferences, students' abilities to reason, to judge, and to solve the problems will increase, and the teaching reading comprehension based on fluent reading will be established.