發現閱讀的樂趣

Discovering Joy in Reading

大一學生入學的時候就應該知道如何閱讀英文。尤其是台灣學生，初中開始就學英文。也就是說，進入大學前，他們已經學了六年英文。近年來由於英文學習機構到處林立，很受歡迎，許多學生學英文的時間已經超過六年。經過那麼多年的訓練，他們開始讀大學的時候，應該可以經由閱讀英文來學習，而非學習如何閱讀英文。許多修習大一英文課程的大一學生也這麼期盼。他們期盼經由教師指定的外文讀物中學習到所習外文的文化及其包含的價值觀、理念、生活態度。但是，大一語文閱讀的班級常高達六十個學生，而且學生的語文能力差異極大。這個時候，教師出於無奈，只得利用讀本作為教導句子的範本，或利用古老的翻譯模式來教導閱讀。這二種方法使得閱讀課淪為單字和文法練習課，而將文化埋沒在大堆的單字和句子結構裏。更嚴重的是，這樣做犧牲了閱讀的樂趣和學習的樂趣。本文作者相信，大部分的教師都希望他們的學生瞭解，閱讀只是藉以達到目的的方法，而不是目的本身。本文介紹一種改良的「持續閱讀」（Sustained Silent Reading） 法，適用於英文非母語學生。藉由這種方法，可使閱讀英文成為樂事而非苦事。本文並提呈實驗證明，將「快樂閱讀」引進教室，不但可以增進單字、文法、理解力，還可以增強學生的自信，改變他們對閱讀的態度和習慣。

By the time the freshman enters the university he ought to have passed the “learn to read” stage. After all, the student in Taiwan has studied English since junior high school, which means that he or she has had at least 6 years of English prior to college. In fact, in recent years many students have had more than 6 years of English due to the growth and popularity of the ubiquitous language institutes in this country. Therefore, by the time he starts the university, the student ought to be ready to “read to learn.”Many of our students come to the Freshman English Reading class with this expectation too. They look forward to doing the assigned reading where they will learn something about the values, opinions and attitudes of a western or foreign culture that underlie the language being studied. However, when a reading teacher meets an enormous class (Freshman Reading course tend to have as many as 60 students per class) of diverse proficiency, out of frustration, s/he often resorts to using the reading material as a source of model sentences, or, more frequently, to follow the old translation method. In either case, the reading course tends to be amere extension of supplementary exercises for vocabulary improvement and grammar explanations, with all cultural content lost in a jumble of words and sentence structures, and, most important of all, with the disappearance of much of the joy of reading and learning gone. The writer assumes that most teachers want their students to understand that reading is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.The goal of this paper is to introduce a modified Sustained Silent Reading program suitable for the EFL/ESL setting whereby reading is seen not as a chore but something to enjoy. In addition, this presentation reports on how bringing pleasure reading into the reading classroom can not only improve their vocabulary, grammar and reading comprehension, but also change the confidence, attitude and reading habits of our students.