A Research On Reading Strategies Of High-School Students In Second Language Learning

Language learning strategies, being specific actions, behaviors, tactics, or techniques, facilitate the learning research on the learning strategies which were initiated by Rubin and Nainman et al. in the middle 1970s. A central research project on learning strategies is the comprehensive research programme by O'Malley and Chamot, who classified learning strategies into three groups: 1) metacognitive; 2) cognitive strategies; 3) social/affective strategies. The newly-issued National English Curriculum Standard has already listed learning strategies as one of the main educational goals. The use of learning strategies can not only obviously promote the proficiency of learning English but also improve English learning methods, which benefits students to become the autonomous learners.For a long time, reading has been playing a significant part on language teaching. With the development of psycholinguistics, applied linguistics and second language acquisition researches, many linguists and experts have made a variety of analysis researches on reading process. Their studies have mainly focused on: 1) reading models; 2) strategies used by successful readers; 3) distinction between reading strategies and reading skills. Yet, because reading, as a psycholinguistic guessing game, is highly interactive. It is difficult to understand a reader's mental activity through outer observation. Apart from this, the reading achievement has been considered as the unique standard to judge successful readers from unsuccessful ones, which does not frequently agree with the learners' creative competence.The present study tends to explore the relevant contexts about high-school learners' using reading strategies from a cognitive perspective and reading strategies. The study attempts to answer the following questions: 1) Is training the high-school students' reading strategies beneficial to learners to improve the proficiency and develop independent learning? Or is it necessary for a high school to offer reading course? 2) What are reading strategies used by high-school learners? 3) What is the relationship among reading strategies, metacognitive awareness and reading proficiency?The experiment was conducted in a key high school in Liaoning Province. Two natural classes, 126 first-grade students, 63 each class, were involved in theexperimental process. One was an experimental group, the other a control group. The experimental group was assigned to adopt reading schema theory and interactive reading model, while the control group followed the traditional instruction. To ensure the experiment's scientific quality, one pre-test, given before the experiment, showed no differences between two groups. Within half a year's experiment, their performances were measured three times separately, which all indicated obvious difference was gradually growing between two groups. The experiment presents that it is of great importance that English teachers should instruct students to learn to use the reading strategies and train their autonomous learning competence.Questionnaire investigation was conducted to the experimental group, 63 students and statistic results were shown as follows:1. The high-school students were all frequent users of self-management (MET), imagination(COG), repetition(COG), and lowering anxiety(AFF/SOC) and infrequent users of self-monitoring(MET), transfer(COG) and cooperation(AFF/SOC).2. Successful readers lay emphasis on the contextual understanding, logical inference and structural analysis, while unsuccessful readers are limited to partial conception.3. In the reading process, successful readers frequently interact with the texts, while unsuccessful readers only decode the text literally.4. Successful readers appear to use more strategies than less successful readers and also use strategies more frequently and flexibly.5. Forming the students' metacognitive awareness has a great effect on training reading strategies and proving reading proficiency.The findings of the study are of great significance for Engl...