An Empirical Study On Fostering College Students' English Reading Autonomy Through Strategy Training

This study aims at exploring the effects of strategy training on fostering college students' English reading autonomy by utilizing the method of questionnaire, interview and checking reading journals. The results of the study suggest strategy training has positive effects on developing English reading autonomy by changing students'attitude towards reading and their autonomous reading ability.This study devised a 14-week experiment intended to explore the effectiveness of fostering college students'English reading through strategy training. The participants involved in the experiment were 75 non-English majors, with 40 students in the experimental class and 35 students in the control class. Both classes were taught by the same teacher. The experimental procedure involved two sections, in-class and out-of-class. Students in the experiment class received strategy training in the class and signed up a learner contract out of class and kept reading journals to record their use of strategies in extracurricular reading and their progress in autonomous English reading. Research methods involved qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. All the participants in two classes undertook questionnaires on their English reading autonomy and their use of reading strategies before and after the experiment. Data collected from questionnaires were processed by SPSS to make quantitative analysis. At the end of the experiment, interviews were given to some students in the experimental class. According to the interviews and students'reading journals, the author made qualitative analysis.As shown by the results, strategy training is contributive to the development of college students'English autonomy and their use of reading strategies. However, the results of the study also suggest that this method requires further improvement, although this approach has positive effects on the development of English reading autonomy. Hence, when developing students'English reading autonomy, English teachers are advised to fully consider the actual situation of teaching, so as to provide more effective guidance for students.This thesis is divided into 5 chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction dealing with the background, the purpose, the significance and the organization of the thesis. Chapter 2 is a literature review. In this part, the author makes a brief review of previous studies on the development of learner autonomy, strategy training and reading autonomy. Chapter 3 focuses on the research design, referring to research procedure, instruments, data collection and analysis. Chapter 4 is the analysis of results and discussion. Chapter 5 is a conclusion of the thesis. In this part, pedagogical implications, limitations and suggestions are also presented.