Examining Students' Strategy Use In College English Reading Comprehension Classroom Assessment

Reading is an important basic skill.Moreover,reading is a goal and approach of learning a foreign language(Wen Qiufang,2003).Cohen(1994)defined reading strategies as the activities that readers conducted consciously or unconsciously to understand reading materials.Cohen(1996)pointed out test-taking strategies were processes that students involved consciously in the test taking process.Additionally,teaching students strategies is one of the important tasks for reading instructions.This study examines students' use of reading strategies and test-taking strategies in their college English reading comprehension classroom assessment.The aims are to explore the gender,major,and gender-by-major effects on students' reading strategy and test-taking strategy use;relationship between their reading comprehension performance and use of reading strategies/test-taking strategies;the prediction of students' gender,metacognitive reading strategy,cognitive reading strategy,and test-taking strategy use on reading scores.A total of 165 freshmen majoring in Science and Arts at Hunan University were invited to complete a final reading comprehension test and a strategy questionnaire.Using Statistic Package for Social Science(SPSS)21.0,the following data analyses were performed: factor analysis,descriptive statistics,factorial analysis of variance(ANOVA),correlation analysis,and multiple regression analysis.The following major findings are reported:There is a significant gender effect on students' metacognitive reading strategy 1(assessing the situation before the event),metacognitive reading strategy 2(monitoring during the event)and cognitive reading strategy 1(main idea)use;With regard to the major effect,a significant effect is found on metacognitive reading strategy 1(assessing the situation before the event)use.Nevertheless,a significant gender-by-major effect is only found on metacognitive reading strategy 1(assessing the situation before the event)use.There is a significant gender effect on their test-taking strategy use;nevertheless,there are no significant major,and gender-by-major effects on their test-taking strategy use.There is a significant(moderate positive)relationship between their reading scores and metacognitive reading strategy 2(monitoring during the event),cognitive reading strategy 1(main idea),cognitive reading strategy 2(linking with prior knowledge),and test-taking strategy use;A significant(weak positive)relationship is found between their reading scores and metacognitive reading strategy 1(assessing the situation before the event),metacognitive reading strategy 3(self-evaluating after the event)use.Approximately 43.2% of the variance in participants' reading comprehension scores are explained by the predictors(gender,metacognitive reading strategy,cognitive reading strategy and test-taking strategy use).The following two important educational implications are proposed.First,the reading instructions on metacognitive,cognitive and test-taking strategy use can enhance students' reading scores to some degree.Moreover,males should be paid more attention to the instructions of metacognitive reading strategy 1(assessing the situation before the event),metacognitive reading strategy 3(self-evaluating after the event)and cognitive reading strategy 1(main idea)use.With regard to the major effect,students in Arts should gain more instructions on metacognitive reading strategy 1(assessing the situation before the event)and test-taking strategy use.Second,it is suggested that the college English reading comprehension course developers make a connection of the reading materials and questions in the practical training of strategies.Further,for non-major freshmen,much attention should be paid on developing students' strategies relevant to CET-4 reading exam such as understanding main idea,details,inferencing,and guessing.