An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of Verbal Reports In Reading Strategy Learning On College English Learners

Verbal reports, as an important research strategy to help teachers identify what reading strategies students used, have been widely practiced in the past 40 years and have proved helpful. Yet an experimental study of verbal reports being an cooperative learning strategy has been rare. The present study introduces verbal reports into exposition reading comprehension training to study their effects on Chinese college students.The thesis is composed of four chapters. The author, in the first place, reviewed the major EFL reading approaches, theories underpinning the use of verbal reports, and related studies. The reading comprehension strategy"lexical cohesion pattern construction"(LCPC) was introduced. Then the author put forward two research questions: 1)what are Chinese college students'attitudes toward verbal reports, and exposition reading in general? 2) Do verbal reports help improve Chinese college students'overall reading quality?A quasi-experiment was conducted among 60 non-English major college freshmen in Tsingdao University. Two classes of the same level were chosen: one served as the experimental class; the other as the control class. The experiment lasted for 10 weeks, during which the two classes received equal training of the LCPC exposition reading strategy, and the use of verbal reports was emphasized in the experimental class. The data collected included questionnaires, students'self-reflection pieces, lexical pattern sheets and bond tables, notes of the teacher's observation, and the summaries of the pretest and posttest. We conducted quantitative analysis on the data collected by using the statistical package SPSS 10.0. In order to provide a complete picture of the research focus, we also made qualitative analysis by means of questionnaire survey, teacher's observation and case studies. The results obtained showed that 1)Chinese college students held positive attitudes toward verbal reports in reading practice; 2) verbal reports help improve their reading ability. They were significantly helpful when students read medium or higher-level expository reading materials. We also found that verbal reports helped cultivate greater confidence in reading and foster students'motivation. Therefore, verbal reports can be applied to college English classes as a cooperative reading strategy.The present study may shed light on research of similar kinds and serve as reference to college English teachers and students. But due to time limit, the findings are limited and many aspects are ignored. Researches of larger scale on these aspects are expected.