A Contrastive Study Of English Learners' Chinese Reading Strategies And English Reading Strategies

The past three decades has seen an upsurge of intensive interest in the study of language learning strategies, among which reading strategies have gained greatly important advances. In China, since the 1980's, there has appeared literature on the research of language learning strategies. All these studies mainly concern English learning strategies used by Chinese students, and the relationship between strategy use and language achievements. However, the influence of Chinese learning strategies on English learning strategies has long been neglected, and there has been little contrastive research on Chinese students'Chinese reading strategy and English reading strategy. To find out how students'Chinese reading strategy differs from and affects their English reading strategy, the present study focuses on the investigation of the non-English majors'Chinese reading strategy and English reading strategy. The author attempts to answer the following research questions:1. What kind of Chinese reading strategies and English reading strategies do the readers frequently use?2. What are the differences between good and poor readers in their employment of Chinese and English reading strategies respectively?3. What is the relationship between Chinese reading strategies and English reading strategies?The study was carried out on 95 college students using two questionnaires, which are based on O'Malley and Chamot's taxonomy of learning strategy. The data collected from the questionnaires were examined through Statistical Package for the Social Science (SSPS) 12.0. Procedures as descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and t-test for independent and paired samples have been adopted.The results of the study reveal that:1. Students use reading strategies more frequently in English reading than in Chinese reading, and they employ metacognitive strategies most frequently in English reading. While in Chinese reading they report employing cognitive strategies most frequently. Social/affective strategies are the least used ones in both English reading and Chinese reading. 2. When reading Chinese, good readers employ reading strategies more frequently than poor readers, and good and poor readers are most different in the type of social/affective they use. But in the type of metacognitive and cognitive strategies, the difference between the two learner groups is not so obvious.3. In English reading, good readers employ reading strategies more frequently than poor readers. Good and poor readers are significantly different in the type of metacognitive strategies and social/affective strategies they use. But in terms of cognitive strategies, the difference between the two groups is not so obvious.4. Students who have better (worse) Chinese reading strategies have better (worse) English reading strategies. More specifically, students employ metacognitive strategies more often in reading English than in reading Chinese, while they employ cognitive strategies more often in reading Chinese than in reading English.Finally, some pedagogical implications are given at the end of the thesis. It is suggested that teachers and students should be informed of the importance of learning strategies and Chinese reading strategy, and students should be responsible for their own study. Furthermore, students should be motivated to use social/affective strategies more.