A Survey Of Non-English Majors' Reading Strategy Use

Since Goodman (1967, 1971) put forward the top-down model, the focus of reading research has been changed from the result to the description and study of reading process. Hence the investigation of reading strategies becomes more and more important. The aim of this thesis is to look into the current situation of reading strategy use by college non-English majors: What strategies are frequently used and what strategies are more closely related to reading proficiency.Both descriptive research and qualitative research are used in this essay. First, the 150 subjects, who are second-year non-English majors from Shandong Institute of Architecture and Engineering, answered a questionnaire of 26 questions. These questions can be classified into 6 main reading strategies. The score of each question ranks from 1 to 5, which indicates different frequency. All the 150 responses are valid. Second, the subjects had a test on the four reading passages taken from Band 4 exam (January 2005), except that 8 subjects, 4 successful and 4 unsuccessful, were chosen to have the test individually in other classrooms since they were expected to verbalize their reading process of one of the four passages for later investigation. They were chosen on the basis of their average reading scores of the three final exams and the recommendation of their teachers. Then the scores of the questionnaire and of the four passages were computerized and analyzed by the SPSS11.5. The result was finally embodied in a form, which was composed of 5 aspects, i.e. mean, frequency scale, standard deviation, correlation coefficient and total average. In order to have a further investigation of students' mental activities while reading, a qualitative research was also employed. The 8 subjects had a simple training on think-aloud and two trials in order to get familiar with the method. Then they were asked to verbalize their thoughts when they read the first passage. This passage, with 11 additional questions, was aimed to test the six mainreading strategies. Finally the subjects had a short interview on reading comprehension and on the passage they just read. The interview, together with their verbalization, was recorded for further analysis.The conclusions of the survey are described as follows: (1) Although non-English majors do use some strategies while reading, they lack a systematic knowledge of reading strategies since they are only familiar with certain strategies, or even certain parts of a strategy. In other words, generally speaking, non-English majors can't use reading strategies flexibly. (2) Strategies comparatively frequently used by non-English majors are skimming, scanning and word-attack skill. Using background knowledge to infer, locating topic sentences, looking for corresponding details, paying attention to conjunctions while analyzing discourse structure and using morphological information to tackle new words are the strategies that are more closely related to reading proficiency. (3) Successful readers and unsuccessful readers differ greatly in the following aspects: First, successful readers know more strategies than unsuccessful readers do and they are more conscious of using them while reading. Second, successful readers are more conscious of making use of context and as far as discourse structure analysis is concerned, they do better than unsuccessful readers. Third, successful readers are more conscious of time. They usually read faster when skimming or scanning and they know what kind of information can be safely ignored. On the contrary, unsuccessful readers often read slowly word- by- word and would stop at unknown words or complex sentences for a long time, or they will hurry into another extreme and ignore too much information, which consequently results in the misunderstanding of the text. Finally, successful readers have a down-to-earth attitude towards English learning while unsuccessful readers seem a bit lazy and don't know how to work hard and make up for their shortcomings.In addition, some suggestions are also given, such as a systematic introductionand more practice of reading strategies, increasing reading rate and verifying reading strategies.Despite some existing limitations, the survey of reading strategies among non-English majors does provide English teachers with some useful information for the teaching of reading.