An Investigation Of Learning Strategies In English Reading That Chinese College-Level Struggling Readers Employ

This article reports on an investigation into Chinese college-level struggling readers'learning strategy awareness and their actual strategy use in EFL contexts. Compared with more successful readers among all the subjects under investigation, the low-achieving reading group have their distinctive patterns of strategy use. In response to needs of the particular reading group, the author has flexibly developed the Strategy Training Program to remedy and develop their readings. In conducting the research, an attempt has been made to investigate how poor readers with the undergoing strategy training change their use of strategies and how these changes are related to their reading abilities. This, in turn, would be expected to shed light on certain instructional implications. In order to ensure the reliability and validity of the present research, both quantitative and qualitative research methods have been employed. In combination with the data collected from other sources including reading proficiency scores, questionnaire item scores at both pre- and post- training stages, verbal protocol analysis, the method commonly used in studying the reading comprehension processes, has revealed the valuable data and shown the strategies used by struggling readers at different phases of the experiment. The findings have indicated that non-proficient readers have apparently increased their awareness of strategy use when engaged in English reading, and the correlation between attempted use of taught strategies and improved reading performance has been calculated significantly. Based on the changing patterns of struggling readers, the author points out that the effective integration of learning strategy training into normal classroom instructions or fairly longer periods of strategy training will produce better results. Though some potential problems still exist to be solved, it is hoped that the results of the present research can be generalized in a larger context. Foreign language teachers are also advised to pay more attention to struggling learners and equip them with useful learning strategies to facilitate their English learning.