The Effectiveness Of Strategies-based Instruction In The Chinese EFL Reading Classroom For University-level Minority English Majors

This research was an empirical study on the effectiveness of the strategy-based instruction in the Chinese EFL reading classrooms for University-level minority English majors. Subjects were the junior English majors in Yunnan University of the Nationalities at different reading ability levels. The total number of the subjects was 119. They were divided into two groups: experimental group (N=61) and control group (N=58). Based on reading teaching syllabus for junior English majors and a pre-training questionnaire, which identified the students' reading difficulties, seventeen metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies were selected for instruction. The training lasted for a duration of two semesters.The present study combined the instruments of pre-test, post-test, questionnaires and interviews to gather the needed data, and used a taxonomy of strategies developed by O'Malley and Chamot (1990), which was modified to more accurately reflect reading strategies actually applied by the participants in the research (altogether 26 sub-strategy variables within 17 strategies). Results of the experimental group were compared with those of the control group. These results were analyzed from quantitative and qualitative perspectives.The findings showed that strategies-based training had a strong positive effect on EFL readers' comprehension gain scores. The training was not only feasible but also effective in developing junior minority English majors' comprehension performance, especially among lower ability readers. Further, the analysis of the results showed that Students' belief of successful and unsuccessful strategies influenced their use of the trained reading strategies.