A Study Of The Effect Of Strategy Training On Students' English Reading Ability In Higher Vocational Colleges

Reading strategies, one kind of the language learning strategies, refer to strategies used by language learners aiming to improve their reading comprehension. It not only contains some reading skills such as predicting, making global inferences, making lexical inferences, skimming, scanning, but also includes selective and restraining actions taken by readers for certain purposes. Through researches and experiments, we find reading strategies can be gained by training.Reading strategy training refers to activities in which readers make effective use of reading strategies to deal with reading materials in a foreign language under the instruction of a teacher. Reading strategies play an essential role in English teaching as it will help readers to improve their reading comprehension ability so as to achieve their reading targets. Besides, it is also valuable to discover the most appropriate way of reading to oneself and strengthen the ability of independent learning, thus making preparations for lasting studies.Higher Vocational Education has become an important component of higher education in our country. With the development of the Higher Vocational Education, the ability of learner autonomy in English reading is called for. However, few researches in this field have touched the vocational college students. Therefore, the study to be taken is of great significance.This thesis reports an experimental study of EFL strategy training. The study is designed mainly to explore the effect of the strategy instruction on vocational college students' English reading ability.In this study, 80 students from Hunan Railway College of Science & Technology were divided into two groups. One contains 40 participants receiving a four-month strategy instruction and the other one includes 40 control subjects receiving the four-month regular language course. Both the experimental group and the control group finished a pre-questionnaire and a post-questionnaire for reading strategies. Besides, all the subjects took the pre-test and post-test. The scores were statistically analyzed by using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). In addition, some subjects were interviewed after implementing strategy instruction.Findings indicate that the overall use of reading strategies of the vocational college students is not satisfactory and strategy training is quite necessary at vocational colleges. The students have a positive attitude towards reading strategy training. In addition, strategy training does improve vocational college students' English reading interest and reading ability.The present thesis is composed of four chapters. Chapter One presents a review of the literature of learning strategies, reading strategies and strategy training. Chapter Two expounds theories and methodologies relating to reading. Chapter Three highlights the present study by describing the experiment. Chapter Four gives a detailed description, analysis and discussion of the research results. Finally, the conclusion of the study provides methodological and practical implications, points out the limitations of the study and gives suggestions for further researches in the field.