An Investigation Of Reading Strategy Use And Gender Differences In Reading Strategy Use By Non-English Majors

Being an important part of active language learning, reading strategies are attracting more and more attention of scholars in the field of Second Language Acquisition. From the 1990s'on, considerable efforts have been made to document and classify the reading strategies used by students, and to find out whether reading strategy use correlates with the reading proficiency. More recently, extensive studies have been conducted to explore the strategic difference between males and females. However, these studies are based on cognitive information-processing framework of learning, and only see strategies as the product of learners'cognitive style, personality or hemispheric preference. Different from these existing reading strategy studies, this paper proceeds to investigate the use of reading strategies by non-English majors from a social educational perspective. It contends that the emergence and development of reading (learning) strategies are directly related to the practice of the culture groups.In this study, both a survey and a semi-structured interview are employed. The survey, using the adapted version of Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI) (Version 1.0) by Mokhtari and Reichard (2002), examines the self-reported reading strategy use of 150 non-English majors(15 students are rejected because their responses had missing value)in Jiangxi Normal University. In order to find out whether significant difference on reading strategy exist between females and males, SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) (version 10.0) is used to process the data acquired in the survey. Meanwhile, 8 students are selected to participate in the semi-structured interview, which is designed to elicit explanation for the survey results.Interesting findings have been revealed in this study. The survey results have showed that these non-English majors can use most of the reading strategies with a medium frequency. It is also found that problem-solving strategies are more frequently used by the students than global strategies and supportive strategies. As regards the gender differences, females surpass males in overall strategy use as well as in supportive strategy use. However, male students show superiority in critical and purposeful reading over their female counterparts. Analysis of these findings as well as the interview results revealed that gender differences in the students'use of reading strategies could be accounted for by the following three factors concerning their social and educational background: 1) universal belief that females are superior to males in English learning and reading, 2) different profiles of males and females developed in the process of socialization 3) differences between males and females in social position.Beneficial implications have also been drawn from these findings of this study. For non-English majors, more training are needed on analyzing and evaluating the information, noticing the tables and figures, discussing with others and reading aloud– the three items of strategies seldom used by the students. In the reading strategy training, females and males should be treated differently. For females, emphasis should be put on critical and purposeful reading, while for males more explicit training is needed for the use of supportive reading strategies which require patience and care. More importantly, the students should be helped to free themselves from the social bias that certain strategies are gender orientated.