The Research And Practice Of English Reading Skills Strategies

Reading is the most important purpose and also the most important means of language learning. Reading skills 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. It is thought that the strategy use matters much with the reading effects. Thus research on reading strategies is of great importance in language learning. The present study intends to investigate reading strategies employed by the non-English major students who learn English as a second language from a cognitive perspective. The author attempts to find out the difference in reading strategies among the different level students after they have finished their reading skills training .The following questions are to be answered: 1. Do skills training improve the students'reading ability? 2. How is the effectiveness of reading skills training related to the reading proficiency of the students? 3. Which kinds of reading comprehension are affected by reading skill training? The study was carried out in HuLudao College in Liao Ning Province. Two classes 70 non –English major students, The study used a questionnaire of reading skills and a reading proficiency pre—test and post—test were given to the students. Computer program SPSS and T test, were utilized to investigate if there were significant differences after their reading strategy training, and the major findings of the present study are: Reading skills training play an important role in EFL reading. The effectiveness of the strategy training varies with the students' reading proficiency; especially the low proficiency group improves the most, followed by the intermediate proficiency group and the high proficiency group. Reading strategy training can improve students' performance on some kinds of reading comprehension questions. The thesis suggested that the teaching of English reading should be based on the training of skills, enlarge the students'vocabulary, and overcome the bad habits of reading in order to help them increase their reading ability. This thesis is composed of the following five chapters: Chapter One is an introduction, which gives a brief account of the background of the research concerning this topic. And the reasons why this research was done and points out the necessity and validity of carrying out this present research. Chapter Two mainly builds up the theoretical position of language learning strategies from the view of language earning theories and its goals. In this part author points out that language learning is a process of interactive use of declarative and procedural knowledge and a processes of solving problems. Chapter Three provides a detailed discussion about models of second language reading. Then it illustrates some previous studies on use of reading strategies, then the reading skills discussed in more details. Chapter Four focuses on the course of the present study. The author introduces the study methods, the subject selection, the data collection, the procedure and describes the results of the study and the analysis of the results. The last chapter of this thesis concludes the research and gives some advice to the teachers on how to improve the students' reading ability further as well as some advice on the future research in this field.