| IntroductionReading is one of the four essential language skills——listening, speaking, reading and writing. For EFL college students, reading is a key to success in their higher education. There are four abilities that underlie one's reading proficiency: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence. (Canale & Swain) With the development of language learning strategies, the study of strategic competence of reading has surged. However, there are still some questions unsolved, such as the typology of reading strategies and the differences between good and poor readers in their use of reading strategies. And this study intends to answer the following five questions: 1. How many reading strategies are used in learners' reading process?2. Do reading strategies influence one's reading achievements? If yes, then3. Do good readers' reading strategies have the same predictive power with poor readers'?4.What are the differences between good and poor readers in their employment of reading strategies?5. Do good readers use reading strategies more successfully than poor readers?Chapter 1 Understanding of Language learning strategiesAs language teaching has become more learner-focused, the study of language learning strategies has become a hot issue. There have been various definitions of language learning strategies, so perhaps the best way to define them is to list their main characteristics(Ellis, 1994: 532-533). They are:1. Strategies refer to both general approaches and specific actions or techniques used to learn a second language.2. Strategies are problem-oriented — the learner deploys a strategy to overcome some particular learning problem.3. Learners are generally aware of the strategies they use and can identify what they consist of if they are asked to pay attention to what they are doing or thinking.4. Strategies involve linguistic behavior (such as requesting the name of an object) and non-linguistic (such as pointing at an object so as to be told its name).5. Linguistic strategies can be performed in the first language and in the second language.6. Some strategies are behavioral while others are mental. Thus some strategies are directly observable, while others are not.7. In the main, strategies contribute indirectly to learning by providing learners with data about the second language which they can then process. However, some strategies may also contribute directly.8. Strategy use varies considerably as a result of both the kind of task the learner is engaged in and individual learner preferences.Since there is no consensus in the definition of language learning strategies, their classification is also in dispute. Of all the classifications, O'Malley & Chamot's (1994) is generally acknowledged. They put all the language learning strategies into three categories: metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/linguistic strategies, and each includes several sub-strategies.The reason for the difficulty of studying language learning strategies is that there are many factors that may influence the choice of learning strategies. Generally speaking, factors affecting strategy choice can be divided in to two groups, one is the individual factors, and the other is environmental factors. Individual factors include beliefs and attitudes, age, aptitude, learning style, motivation, personality and personal background. Environmental factors include the language being learnt, the setting in which learning takes place, the tasks that the learner is asked to perform and social factors. The factors discussed above have been investigated by many strategy researchers, but there is one factor neglected: the cross-linguistic influence on language learning strategies — first language transfer. Strategy transfer is still a controversial issue now. Bates and Macwhinney put forward Competition Model which supports the occurrence of strategy transfer, while Clark (1980) draws a contrary conclusion from his...
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