A Study In The Reading Strategy Use And Training Of Non-English Majors

In Chinese EFL teaching, reading is universally and officially acknowledged to be a prior language skill. However, the results of the teaching of reading are not so satisfactory. After many years' study, many college students have not obvious improvement in English reading. On the contrary, more and more students become less and less interested in English reading. The solution to the problem has aroused the attention of researchers and teachers.Reading strategies refer to strategies used by language learners aiming to improve their reading comprehension, which not only deal with some certain reading skills but also the selecting and controlling activities of carrying out a certain reading aim. In recent years, more and more researches have been done in this field. They try to find out a solution to the problems on reading difficulty by studying reading strategies use and training.From the view of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology this paper reviewed the literature of reading theories and reading models. It also reviewed the literature of the previous research of reading strategies. Based on these theory frames, a ten-week experiment was carried out in order to probe the effectiveness of strategy training. The experiment was designed to answer the following questions:1. Is there any difference between efficient and non-efficient readers in strategy use in English reading?2. Can reading comprehension ability be improved by strategy training?The experiment was divided into two phases. In the first phase the author designed a questionnaire in order to find out the difference between the efficient and non-efficient readers in reading strategy use in English reading. The result showed that there was no significant difference between these two groups. In the second phase the author carried out strategy training. Two classes participated in the experiment. One is an experimental class, receiving strategy training on reading while the other (control group) didn't. By comparing the results of the pretest and posttest of the two groups, the effectiveness of strategy training was examined. The result of data analysis indicated that reading competence can be improved by strategy training. It also showed that integrating the strategy training into the routine training was quite feasible and effective.This thesis consists of the following four chapters:Chapter One introduces the significance and the general goal of the present research.Chapter Two reviewed the literature closely related to the present study. Four principal reading models and taxonomy of reading strategies are introduced.Chapter Three introduces the procedures of the experiment together with data analysis and findings from the questionnaire and the experiment.Chapter Four draws a conclusion from the experiment with the discussion on its pedagogical implications.