An Empirical Study Of Reading Strategy Training On Undergraduates Majoring In English Education

Reading is a basic and important skill in second language acquisition. Thus, to improve the reading ability is fairly essential. With the development of modern cognitive theory, people began to pay attention to the study of the process of reading conducted by the readers instead of the result of reading only. As the reading process is an interaction between the reader and the reading material, the reading strategies that the readers apply and whether they apply them appropriately will greatly affect the reading result.Since the 1970s, many foreign language researchers have done a great amount of research on reading strategies in second language acquisition. The results show that if the readers apply the reading strategies appropriately, they will not only improve their reading ability, but also alleviate the burden in the process of their English learning. Although learner strategy training has been paid much attention to by some researchers, there is still relatively little empirical research into the effect of strategy training on learners, especially in the main-land of China, which is short of good second language acquisition environment. The study aims at the blank. The researcher investigated a group of college students' reading level and found that it was not optimistic. The thesis, which is based on the cognitive theory of reading, devotes to empirical research on the reading strategy training of a group of college students. Its goal is to make most of them be aware of applying the reading strategies appropriately, and to improve their reading level.The study focuses on the investigation of the effects of training in four reading strategies: (1) making text predictions, (2) scanning, (3) making lexical inferences, and (4) identifying the text structure signaling devices and discourse organizations. These strategies were chosen based on the first phase of this study: a survey into the reading strategies of the subjects, and were assured by the questionnaire of the participants' reading strategies they already had applied. The study lasted for a semester. Two intact classes of 30 English education majors each took part in the study. One class was designed as experiment group and the other as control group. Both groups took part in the same language learning program with the same textbook. The only difference is that the experiment group received explicit training of strategies-based instruction of some reading strategies for 25% of the class time, whereas the control group did not accept the training but followed the traditional way of teaching.The project studied the effect of training on the students reading comprehension by means of analyzing test results, questionnaires and interviews and employing the quantitative and qualitative approach. Pre-test and post-test data were collected and independent samples t-test and paired samples t-test were run to analyze and measure the effect of the training.Results of the study indicate that reading strategy training is effective in improving students' reading comprehension. The findings of this study endorse the notion of integrating strategy training into normal language course curriculum.