An Investigation Of Reading Strategies Used By University Readers In British And American Literature Reading

Reader-response theory emphasizes the subjective feeling of readers and it has changed the focus of literary research from the text to the reader’s reading process and response.As one of the main reading groups,university students play an important role in literary reading,thus research on the reading status of university readers at different levels is of great significance.Enlightened by Reader-response theory,this thesis is designed to do an empirical research on the reading strategy use of university readers at different levels,and SPSS is employed in analyzing the use of reading strategies among literary readers.The research aims to investigate and explore the effects of reading experience and literary attainment on the use of reading strategy.Through questionnaire and interview,the author can get more detailed information about readers’ reading status of English literary works,then the implications and suggestions will be provided.This thesis attempts to answer the following questions:1,what is the overall situation of university readers’ use of reading strategies in their literary reading?2,what are the differences existing in the use of reading strategies among readers at different levels?3,what are the correlations between university readers’ use of reading strategies and their literary reading experience?This research selects sixty representative readers from more than a hundred university students,and the readers are divided into three groups according to the investigation of literary reading information and their performances in the literary reading test.Questionnaires and interviews are employed to collect the data of three groups,each of them has twenty readers respectively.Group one is relatively inexperienced,and readers are the non-English majors from Zhixing College.Readers from Group two are the intermediately experienced ones,they are English majors from Zhixing College.Group three is relatively experienced,and they are postgraduates from School of Foreign Languages,Hubei University.The data of this thesis are quantitatively analyzed by SPSS 13.0,the results demonstrate that:first,the frequency of the sixty readers’ general use of reading strategies is not high,which is in a medium level.Among the three sub-categories of reading strategies,the cognitive strategy is more frequently used than the other two sub-categories and the meta-cognitive strategy is the least frequently used;Second,there exists differences among different levels of readers,the frequency of using reading strategies increases progressively from Group one to Group two then to Group three;Third,there are positive correlations between the readers’ reading strategy use and their literary reading experience,the readers’ use of reading strategy in literary reading is highly influencing their reading results and efficiency.Readers from Group three are more skilled at using reading strategies than readers from Group one,and their performances in reading English literary works are also better than Group one.What’s more,the author finds that the reading condition of university students is quite worrying:university readers’ lack of interest on English literary reading is very common on campus.They don’t spend much time in reading.Even part of the English majors hasn’t known well about the basic knowledge of literature.So the author suggests that the responsibility of improving this situation should be taken by three sides:readers,universities and teachers.Universities should open more English literature courses for students,and teachers should train the students to use reading strategies properly.In order to improve literary reading ability,university.readers themselves should cultivate the consciousness of increasing their quantity of reading and employing appropriate reading techniques.