An Action Research on Improvement of Reading Comprehension of CET4

This action research is aiming at improvement of reading comprehension of College English teaching and learning, which is a major time-consuming course with low efficiency in colleges and universities in China. The research subjects were 134 first-year college students of science, engineering and liberal arts, who were from either developed provinces or developing ones. The reading materials used for this research were from passages of reading comprehension of CET4 of each year. This action research went through two stages, at the first of which it focused on improvement by skills-based teaching, but with not much improvements obviously, and at the second of which, after a deep analysis, it combined with text-based teaching and introduced linguistic and schematic knowledge, and finally achieved a good improvement of reading ability with the result showing significant difference, compared with that of the first stage.