A Survey Of English Reading Strategy Used By Non-English Majors At Different School Levels

Reading is important in foreign or second language learning. In China, reading comprehension has the largest part in the whole score of all kinds of exams and English proficiency tests. Students know the importance of reading and pay special attention to improving their reading proficiency. They spend lots of time and energy in improving their reading comprehension. However, the results and effects are not so satisfying. The weakness in reading always causes their poor performance in different kinds of exams. English teachers are trying so hard all these years to improve teaching skills of reading in various ways. However, reading in our country is still regarded as a channel to learn grammar and enlarge vocabulary by many students and English teachers, and the teaching of reading also mainly focuses on vocabulary and grammar. Thus a clear understanding of the definition of reading, reading process and reading strategies is crucial.Modern language teaching over the past few decades has moved its focus from teachers and teaching to learners and learning. The key aspect of this shift is the study and use of reading strategies in second and foreign language (L2/FL) learning and teaching.Early researches on reading strategies bring hope and important insights into many aspects of reading like process, characteristics and strategy training. It is found that successful readers can not only perceive their reading process, but also they can choose proper reading strategies to facilitate reading process and use reading strategies more frequently. Thus it is very essential and necessary to raise reading strategy awareness of the less successful readers, and to allow all the students to be informed of more reading strategies.The author uses a questionnaire to investigate whether there is a difference in reading strategy use between non-English major students at two different school levels. The objectives of this study are to (1) identify the variety and range of reading strategy use of students in their reading; (2) describe the differences in strategy use of students at different school levels; (3) find out if gender plays a role in reading strategy use and (4) confirm if there is relationship between reported reading strategy use and self-rated reading ability.To test the reliability of reading strategy questionnaire, the author piloted the questionnaire on 29 sophomores from Shandong University and 39 freshmen from Jinan Radio and TV University (JNRTVU). The values of Alpha by SPSS (for internal consistency) were 0.86 and 0.89 respectively. Thus, this questionnaire was reliable for further statistical analysis.The participants were 120 sophomores from Communication University of China (CUC) and JNRTVU. One hundred and seven questionnaires were valid and 13 subjects were excluded from the study since their responses were invalid. The data was collected and went through independent sample t-tests and correlation analysis to check whether the significant difference of reading strategy exists.The study shows that students from both CUC and JNRTVU do not have high usage of the reading strategies in the questionnaire. The range of reading strategy use is narrow, and they do not have a wide variety of choices of reading strategies while reading. However, students from CUC use reading strategies more frequently and better, and this difference is statistically significant in 24 individual strategies plus all the four subcategories and overall reading strategy use (p<0.05). Among individual strategies, differences in use of strategies from cognitive and affective subcategories are more common.The analysis of the relationship of reading strategy use and self-rated reading ability within each school shows the significant difference exists. Students who give themselves a high rating on reading ability, regardless of their language background, report a higher use of all of the reading strategies in the survey than those who give themselves a low reading ability rating in each school. However, students from JNRTVU prefer meta-cognitive and affective strategies; while students from CUC consider meta-cognitive, cognitive and social strategies more useful. Meta-cognitive strategies are what they have in common. Gender factor does not bring any difference in reading strategy use in JNRTVU and CUC. However, male students in the two schools report higher usage of reading strategies generally. Male students in CUC even report higher English scores and reading ability than female students. Significant differences of reading strategy use between male and female students in School 2 are found in six individual reading strategies and cognitive reading strategy category.The result from the analysis will present some enlightenment and prediction for English reading and teaching in China. Due to the limitation of present study, future and further researches need to be done in this field, and there is still a long way to go.