The Effect Of Strategy-based Instruction On Graduate Students In EFL Reading Classes

The study investigated the impacts of the explicit strategies-based instruction (SBI) in an intensive reading class of English as a foreign language on Chinese graduate students. The sample consisted of a randomly chosen four classes of 195 students at Taiyuan University of Technology. 96 of them were in the experimental group who received two-term explicit language learning strategy instruction that was integrated into the regular course. The rest 99 of them were in the control group who just had their regular English course. Oxford's (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), Version 7.0, was administrated as measures of learning strategy preferences, and students' test scores in the National English Test (NET) of the Candidates for the Entrance of MA/MS and General English Qualifying Test (GET) for Post-Graduate students of Non-English majors in China were used as measures of English proficiency. Strategies for Success: A Practical Guide to Learning English was also given to the experimental group as reading materials to make a supplement to the strategy instruction. The journals of the experimental group were used to reflect the students' reaction to the instruction. Independent samples t-tests were done, which involved the differences of the students' strategy preferences inpre-questionnaires, in post-questionnaires, in the changes of the pre- and post- questionnaires, and the differences of students' proficiency in pre-test scores, in post-test scores and in the changes of their pre- and post- test scores between the experiment and control groups. Paired samples t-tests of the differences between the pre- and post-questionnaire strategy preferences in each of the two intra-groups were also conducted. Pearson Correlations between the post-test scores and strategy preferences in the post-questionnaires were made. Journals of the experiment students were analyzed. The results revealed that the students who had the SBI significantly increased their cognitive strategies use and the successful ones among them also increased meta-cognitive, compensation and total strategies use significantly. Students' journals reported that the SBI increased the students' self-confidence and their awareness of meta-cognitive strategy use and made them realize their limitation of their own strategy use and know better their own learning styles and personalities. The results also indicated that SBI had no significant effect on students' test performance. There were no significant differences in the strategy use between the successful and less successful students. The less successful students in the control group were relatively higher frequency strategy users. The results of the current study suggest a need for further research to identify other factors rather than SILL learning strategies that may account for the effects of the SBI on proficiency among graduate students and to explore effective training models to make the less successful students more skillful strategic learners.