A Study Of Chineses EFL Learners'Reading Strategies

In Chinese EFL teaching, reading is universally and officially acknowledged to be a prior language skill. However, the results of the teaching of reading are not so satisfactory. Since Goodman抯 psycholinguistic model was posed (1967; 1971), reading has been viewed as an interactive process and a cognitive skill rather than a passive and static process. As a result, the focus of reading research has been shifted from the outcome of reading to a description and investigation of the reading process, which gives rise to the issue of reading strategies. The present study intends to investigate the use of reading strategies, i.e., prediction, word-attack skill, skimming, scanning, structure analysis and inferences during the reading process in Chinese EFL learning. The results will be significant to both EFL learning and teaching. In Chapter One, the feasibility and necessity of studying the use of reading strategies are discussed. In Chapter Two, four principal reading models and taxonomy of reading strategies are introduced. At the same time, the importance of interaction between the reader and text is emphasized. In Chapter Three, the research methods are outlined. The study consists of two parts: both a quantitative research and a qualitative research. The former is mainly a questionnaire investigation, which examines the frequency of reading strategy use and the correlation between the reading strategy use and the reading proficiency of 43 English majors at Wuxi University of Light Industry. The latter aims at finding out the differences in reading strategy use between 4 successful and 4 unsuccessful EFL readers by verbal-report reading and individual interview. In Chapter Four, research findings as well as data analyses will be reported. In Chapter Five, conclusions will be drawn as regards both theoretical significance and iii pedagogical implications of the study. The study finds that the subjects use reading strategies frequently in EFL reading and there are obvious differences between successful and unsuccessful readers: 1. In the reading process, successful readers are interacting with the text while unsuccessful readers are only decoding the text. 2. Successful readers pay more attention to the larger context, i.e., comprehension of the overall text while unsuccessful readers are confined to the immediate context. 3. The differences not only show up in quantities, i.e., how much they use, but also in qualities, i.e., how they use the strategies flexibly and appropriately. 4. Successful readers use the reading strategies more consciously than unsuccessful readers, especially in word-attack skill and structure analysis. 5. The differences of making inferences and structure analysis, especially complex syntactic analysis and discourse analysis, are salient among the six reading strategies. This study is not without limitations. Further research on reading strategy use needs to be carried out. Liu Dandan (major: linguistics) Supervised by Prof. Su Xiaojun...