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  3. Common Faults and Eye Movement There are a number of bad habits which poor readers adopt. Most of these involve using extra

Common Faults and Eye Movement There are a number of bad habits which poor readers adopt. Most of these involve using extra

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问题                                    Common Faults and Eye Movement
    There are a number of bad habits which poor readers adopt. Most of these involve using extra body movement in the reading process. In efficient reading, the muscles of the eye should make the only external movement. Of course there must be vigorous mental activity, but extra body movements, such as pointing with the finger or moving the lips, do not help reading and often slow it down.
POINTING AT WORDS
    A fault that is often seen when students are trying to concentrate is pointing to the words with a finger, pencil or ruler. Young children and very poor readers often point with a finger at each word in turn. Slightly more mature readers sometimes hold a pencil or ruler underneath the line which they are reading. While marking the line might be helpful for beginning readers, it is certainly unnecessary for normal readers. Besides slowing down the reader through the mere mechanical movement of pencil, ruler, or finger, pointing at lines or words tends to cause the student to focus his attention on the wrong thing. The important thing to concentrate on while reading is the idea that the author is trying to communicate, and not the location of the words on the page. The eyes of any child old enough to learn how to read are certainly skillful enough to be able to follow a line of print without extra help from fingers or rulers.
    Another common fault that is easily observed is head movement. This most often occurs when students are nervous about their reading or trying hard, as during a reading speed test. With head movement the student tries to aim his nose at the word he is reading so that as he reads across the line his head turns slightly. When he makes the return sweep to begin a new line his head quickly turns back so that his nose is pointed at the left-hand margin, and he can now begin to read the new line by slowly turning his head. The belief that this head movement aids reading is pure nonsense. Eye muscles are quite capable of shifting the eyes from word to word, and the)’ need no help from neck muscles.
    Often students are quite unaware that they are moving their heads while reading and they need to be reminded by the teacher not to do-it.
VOCALIZATION
    Vocalization is another fault. Some poor readers think it necessary to pronounce aloud each word as it is read. Usually this pronunciation is quite soft, so that the student is more whispering to himself than actually reading aloud, but even this is very undesirable. The chief disadvantage of pronouncing words while you read them is that it tends to tie reading’ speed to speaking speed, and the silent reading of most normal readers is nearly twice as fast as their speaking. Usually this fault can be eliminated in older students by their own conscious effort, possibly with the aid of a few reminders from the teacher.
    Vocalization by beginning readers is a common fault; after a reader reaches some maturity it becomes very undesirable.
    Vocalization takes various modified forms. Sometimes a reader will merely move his lips soundlessly. At other times he may make tongue or throat movements without lip movement. Still other readers will have activity going on in their vocal cords, which can be detected by the student if he places his fingers alongside his vocal cords in the throat while he is reading. Vocal cord vibration can be felt with the fingers quite easily. Like true vocalization, these minor parts of "subvocalization" -- lip movement, tongue or throat movement and vocal cord movement -- can be stopped by conscious effort of the student.
SUBVOCALIZATION
    Subvocalization is the most difficult of all types of vocalization. In suhvocalization there is no body movement. The lips, tongue or vocal cords do not move. But an inner type of speech persists: within the student’s mind he is saying each word to himself, clearly pronouncing each word and then listening to himself, as it were. This fault is difficult, but not impossible, to cure.
    Probably the main reason for subvocalization is the nature of written language. English is written in an alphabet: a set of symbols which stand for speech-sounds. The speech-sounds in turn stand for an idea or thought. Since most students learn to read either after learning to speak or at the same time, there is a natural tendency to relate the printed word to its speech-sound. But it is not necessary to say Or hear the word in order to get its meaning. It is quite possible to look at the printed word and get the idea directly. This is what efficient readers do.
    The fault of subvocalization is often contributed to by teachers who equate fill reading lessons with reading aloud. It is true that reading aloud is important, but unless the Students are to be radio announcers, or follow some similar profession, most of the reading they will do in their lives will be silent reading. Many adults with good education can read novels and text-books and understand them well, yet if asked to read aloud would make a poor showing. Students should practise gasping quickly the ideas presented on a printed page, and not reading aloud without error.
CURING SUBVOCALIZATION
    Remember that the real purpose of reading is to understand what the author is saying. It is quite possible to do this without pronouncing each word. In fact it is undesirable to pronounce each word because of the time it wastes.
    When students first become aware of the fact that they are subvocalizing, they often try to stop it by sheer will-power. They simply say to themselves "I will not subvocalize". Often when the student does this he will stop understanding, whereas before, when he was subvocalizing and saying each word inwardly to himself, he was at [east taking in the story. Now when he tries by will-power to shut off all subvocalization he may not understand a thing. As one student expresses it, "the silence was killing me". If this happens the student should concentrate on the other aspects of reading, namely speed and comprehension. If he must talk to himself while, reading let him say, "What does this mean?", "I don’t believe this", "This point is not related to the paragraph", or "I bet this will be a question on the comprehension test". In short, he should talk about the material but not repeat the words. He should be mentally engaging in a conversation with the author, but not merely parroting what the author says. Efficient reading requires an active mind, not the mere passivity of saying the author’s words.
    At the same time that the reader is urgently trying to understand what the author is saying, and testing out the author’s ideas against his own background of knowledge, he should be trying to speed up the reading process. He should keep in the back of his mind that one of the purposes of this drill is to get him to read faster, and he should attempt in each exercise to read a little faster than he did in the preceding one. If he is actively and forcefully trying to comprehend the subject matter, and at the same time to increase his speed, he will have little time left for subvocalization. So there is a positive cure for subvocalization.
EYE MOVEMENT
    When the eyes are reading a line of print they make a series of short jerky movements along the line, stopping after every one or two words for a very brief pause. The eyes do not, as some people erroneously believe, make a smooth even movement along the line. Each time the eye stops it sees a certain span of material and this span is called the "span of recognition". The span of recognition for most readers is a little over one word. if the total number of words in a paragraph is divided by the total number of eyestops, the ratio will be about 1.25, so we can say that the average person sees about  words per eye-stop or "fixation", as eye-stops are sometimes called. In actual reading practice this might mean that the student might make one fixation on a word of average size, two fixations on a very long word, and at other times see two short words in one fixation.
    Since the length of a fixation is fairly constant for all human beings, being about one-fifth of a second, this raises the interesting problem of how one person can read twice as fast as another. If the fixation-time is constant, then the only other variable is the amount of material which a person sees during a fixation. This is borne out by research. When eye movements are photographed and recorded on a moving strip of film it can be shown that good readers do actually see two or three words in a fixation, while poor readers see one word or less per fixation.
REGRESSION
    One more reading fault the students might see while observing another reading or become conscious of in their own reading is the making of "regressions". A regression is a backward movement along a line of print. This means that the student is rereading a word or phrase. It is easily distinguished from the return sweep, which is usually much longer. Sometimes a regression will take the form of going back over a word or phrase several times before going on to the next part of the line. In a general way, regressions are a sign of poor reading. All readers make some regressions, but good readers make very few, and bad readers make a large number.
    Sometimes a regression means that the reader has come across a new word or phrase which he does not quite understand and wishes to review. Making a regression for this purpose is justifiable. But poor readers have a habit of making regressions and tend to make many more than they need.
    The most common fault among poor readers is the habitual making of too many regressions. Possibly this bad habit was started by the student’s reading material not being properly graded for him. Forcing him to read too difficult material has engendered the habit of making regressions. To cure this habit the student should be given ample amounts of easy reading.
When students first become aware of the fact that they are subvocalizing, they often try to stop it by sheer ______.
选项
答案will-power
解析 见文章小标题Curing Subvocalization下第二段第一句话。
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