An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Strategy Training On Reading Comprehension

Reading plays a crucial role in our daily life as well as in language learning. Of the four language skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing) in second or foreign language acquisition, reading has been considered the most important one. For students of non-English majors in China, reading ability has been equally considered as one of the most important skills that they should acquire. However, for many years, the results from our reading class have neither satisfied the teacher nor the students. As a matter of fact, most of the college students regard reading as their weakest point even though they have put a massive amount of time and energy into it. So effective and efficient reading has fallen into a wishful thinking. How to improve reading ability draws more and more attention.In the early literature review, many studies related to language learning strategies have offered great insights about learners' language learning process, features, and strategies-based instruction. Studies show that successful learners are thoughtful and aware of themselves in relation to the learning process and successful learners appear to use learning strategies more frequently and in qualitatively different ways than learners who are less successful. Now that strategies used by successful language learners are identified and the strategy use of effective and less effective learners are compared, the questions arise of what strategies can and should be taught, and what instructional approach can be used to teach the strategies selected in order to assist learners to learn language efficiently.Although the importance of learning strategies in second or foreign language learning has been realized by many EFL teachers and researchers, the instruction and training of learning strategies in pedagogy is not satisfactory, especially in university-level classrooms in China as for non-English majors. So far, there have been few articles elaborating strategy training in college English learning and how to teach it systematically and practically. In fact, the Chinese EFL teaching is stillproduct-oriented and language-point-focused. Thus, integrating learning strategies into language classroom learning would seem to be a matter of urgency.This study is an empirical study on the impact of strategy training on reading comprehension. The participants in this study are 148 first-year non-English majors who just entered Shandong Institute of Architecture and Engineering in September of 2004 and were assigned to four classes once they enrolled. In this study the author attempted to probe whether there were any significant differences in the frequencies of strategy use and reading proficiency through data analyses of pre- and post-test mean scores of strategy use and reading achievements between the experimental group and the control group. The author set out to diagnose the students' beginning level of reading comprehension and strategy use in English learning process through a test, the SILL, and a think-aloud interview, with the belief that once the teachers or researchers were aware of the students' learning behaviors, they would understand the students' main problems in learning English, they could then guide and instruct the students to understand their problems and learn to use certain strategies consciously in their learning to overcome these problems. After neatly planning and preparing, including problem solving, action plan signing, materials selecting, strategic awareness and background knowledge activating, the author conducted a four-stage model for reading strategies training that entailed both explicit and implicit instructions, with an explicit focus on strategy explanation and modeling only a small part of the time, while the rest of the time the strategies were implicitly embedded into the reading tasks. Finally, the author ended the experiment by post-treatment testing of reading and the SILL, reported strategy use gathering via a verbal report to promote students' self-monitoring and self-evaluating of strategy use. The whole instructional program lasted 18 weeks (an academic semester).SPSS 12.0 (Statistical Product and Service Solutions) for windows was employed to analyze data. Descriptive statistics indicated the frequencies of strategy use and the mean scores, SD, and S.E. of the reading comprehension achievements before and after strategy training. T-test showed the significant differences in the frequencies of strategy use and reading proficiency. The verbal report was used tocollect extra features of the reported strategy use.The analyses and discussion of these findings demonstrated some implications beneficial to foreign language learning as well as teaching. Yet due to various reasons, some limitations yielded inevitably, which would shed light on future studies.