Reading Strategy Instruction And Its Effects On Chinese College Students' Reading Performance

Over the last three decades, great progress has been made in studying the effects of reading strategies in improving students'reading comprehension. Studies designed to explore the effects of strategy instruction usually prove its effectiveness by comparing the subjects'reading comprehension scores obtained before and after strategy instruction, or by comparing reading performance scores of experimental groups and scores of control groups after strategy instruction.This study addresses the following four questions: (1) What effects does strategy instruction with two different instructional models, namely the teacher-modeling and the student-verbalization models, have on Chinese college students'post-instruction strategy use frequency, strategy use performance and reading performance, with pre-instruction strategy use frequency's and reading performance's effects considered? (2) Does the English proficiency level of students have a significant effect on Chinese college students'post-instruction strategy use frequency, strategy use performance and reading performance? (3) Does the interaction of the instructional methods and the English proficiency levels have a significant effect on Chinese college students'post-instruction strategy use frequency, strategy use performance and reading performance? (4) In what ways is the post-instruction reading performance related to other factors investigated in this study?In order to find the answers to these questions, the present study uses a questionnaire study and a quasi-experimental study.The questionnaire study is conducted to refine Reading Strategy Questionnaire (RSQ), and to better organize the strategy instruction in the following quasi-experimental study. The quasi-experimental study includes strategy instruction, questionnaire administration, and reading tests administration. Data from this study are processed by a series of statistical measures.There are four major findings from this study: (1) Out of the four strategy use categories identified in this study (lexical and syntactic organization, summary, prediction and inference, and text organization), Chinese students use text organization strategies the least frequently. (2) Strategy instruction can increase strategy use frequency; the teacher-modeling instructional method is more effective than the student-verbalization method in improving reading strategy use performance and reading performance. (3) Students'English proficiency levels don't have a significant impact on reading strategy use frequency, reading strategy use performance and reading performance. (4) Pre-instruction reading strategy use frequency and reading performance have a great impact on the outcomes of the strategy instruction.This dissertation concludes that reading strategy use performance is more directly associated with reading performance than reading strategy use frequency is. Besides, the present study provides several practical implications for reading instruction and research: (1) one task of college reading instruction in China is to improve reading comprehension by laying more emphases on text-structure organization strategies; (2) reading performance can be improved by improving reading strategy use performance, that is, the quality of strategy use; (3) strategy instruction can be employed before college and organized based on the characteristics of different groups of students'actual strategy use; (4) both thinking-aloud instructional methods applied in this study proved effective, and the teacher-modeling method is more effective.Although there are some limitations concerning this study, implications from this study and suggestions for future study are still supposed to be beneficial for language teachers to organize strategy instruction, select materials for strategy instruction and identify emphasis of strategy instruction.