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e: The president said at a press conference dominated by questions on yesterday’s election results that he could not explain why the Republicans had suffered such a widespread defeat, which in the end would deprive the Republican Party of long-held superiority in the House. It’s not easy for a Chinese student to smooth out the complicated structure of this long sentence at first sight. In order to decode these graphic signs, a grammatical analysis is necessary, but this can be done by the students before or after class. Only when the students fail to present an acceptable explanation should the teacher do the job for them (“That-clause” is the object of the verb “said” and “which-clause” is used as an attribute modifying “defeat”). When the reader reconstructs meaning from the text, he has unavoidably to use the graphic symbols, syntactic structures and semantic systems of the language. The teacher’s task is to point out possible difficulties for the students and guide them to attack the problems. 3.2 Meaning “between the lines” And moreover, Chinese readers often get lost while reading paragraphs with implied meanings or meanings “between the lines”. Suppose the students are asked to read the following paragraph: “If you are interested in buying a pair of contact lenses, be prepared to pay $200 or more. Generally there are three main reasons why people want contact lenses. You may need them because the cornea of your eye is misshapen and ordinary glasses are not satisfactory. If so, you’ll be in the group that comprises 1 to 2 per cent of contact lens wearers. But you may want them for a sport, avocation, or vocation. Perhaps you’re a baseball player, a boxer, a swimmer, an aviator, an actor, or perhaps you’re engaged in an industry where flying particles may endanger your eyes. If you get your contact lenses for one of these reasons, you are in the same group with about 20 per cent of the users. But if for some reasons, you feel that glasses are handicapping our appearance and you would rather have invisible glasses, you’ll have lots of company. About 79 per cent of lens users hope to improve their looks.” The students are then asked to make a decision; which of the following can represent the writer’s intention? A or B. A. To give the reasons for people wearing contact lenses. B. To say that man is sometimes vain. In accordance with my experiences, many readers will prefer A because they can easily find enough evidence to support that decision. If we take the paragraph into further consideration however, we find that they have failed to notice the rational relationship between the users, that is, the writer never fails to mention the percentage of users when giving each reason. The majority of wearers seem to feel that contact lenses are more attractive than glasses. Although the writer purposely establishes his contextual relationship within the paragraph, it may still be difficult for the students to work out what he really means to transfer. 3.3 Anaphoric expressions Anaphoric expression is another pitfall for Chinese students in their reading comprehension. According to Gui Shichun (1991), reference, substitution, ellipsis and lexical cohesion are often talked about under that topic of anaphora in Halliday’s and Hasan’s writings. By reference and substitution the author means the fact that a writer refers back or forward to a word, a fact, a sentence or whatever has been mentioned somewhere else