An Investigation Of English Reading Strategies Used By Non-english Majors

Since the late 1970s, research on reading strategies has become popular all over the world. Reading strategies are defined by some specialists as mental operations relating to how readers perceive a task, what textual cues they attend to, how they make sense of what they read, and what they do when they do not understand. In fact, reading strategies refer to strategies used in a certain specific reading task, including a wide range of cognitive and mental activities. Research shows that reading strategies play a significant role in English study. They can not only help students enhance reading comprehension and overcome comprehension difficulties in a specific reading task, but also help develop overall reading ability in the long run.This study aimed at finding out a general picture of university students'use of reading strategies and trying to generalize characteristics of the use of reading strategies among university students. 150 second-year non-English university students were selected in this study from different majors, of whom 71 were male students and 79 were female students). Of all the 150 students, 10 students were selected to be engaged in a semi-structured interview. A questionnaire and interview were used to investigate reading strategies used by the students, which aimed to address the following research questions: (1) the general tendency in non-English students'use of reading strategies; (2) differences in reading strategy use between students of high proficiency level and those of low proficiency level; (3) students'use of reading strategies affected by gender; (4) relationship between students'use of reading strategies and their reading proficiency. All the data were processed by SPASS (Statistical Package for Social Science) (version 13.0).The results of this study revealed that the reading strategies were widely used by second-year non-English major university students at the medium level. Of all the strategy categories, cognitive reading strategies were the most often used. The results also show that high proficiency students employed overall strategies significantly more frequently than low proficiency students, and that the female students reported higher use of reading strategies than males in all categories. Finally, the finding indicates that reading strategies are significantly correlated with reading proficiency.There are some practical and beneficial implications from the research findings. Firstly, teachers should instruct students to raise awareness of using reading strategies and to learn how to use strategies when reading. Secondly, students should know the strength and deficiency in their own reading strategy use, and then try their best to improve their abilities of using reading strategies. Thirdly, strengthening the basic vocabulary is very essential. As for the gender differences, teachers should make the student aware of the gender differences in reading strategy use and encourage their students to learn to use reading strategies effectively.