A Study Of English Reading Strategies Employed By The First-year Applied English Majors In The Teachers' College

This tentative study sets out to examine whether the first-year Applied English majors in the Foreign Language Department of a normal junior College can fulfill the requirements specified in the Requirements, how frequently they make use of them, and whether there are any disparities between the specifications of the Requirements and the current conditions of English reading strategies employed by them. The investigation involved the students in the four classes in Guilin Teachers' College in an attempt to find out the answers to two questions: 1. How do the students use the English strategies and what problems exist? 2. Are there any differences with statistical significance in using English reading strategies between male and female students? Therefore, it is practical and meaningful to keep probing into how the study motivate and renovate EFL reading teaching in classroom teaching process in our college.The paper falls into five parts. The first part is a brief introduction of the whole thesis, which presents the rationale, research orientation, and significance of the study.Chapter Two is a detailed review of the related studies regarding reading strategies. Beginning with the demonstration of the four basic reading processes, it will present an overview of reading strategy research including the definitions and the classifications of reading strategies, and the achievements since the 1970s at home and abroad.Chapter Three concerns the survey conducted in this study. The investigation mainly takes the form of a questionnaire. In addition, the group interview is adopted to probe into the current overall use of reading strategies and identify their reading problems. In this section, the author presents a detailed account of the purpose, subjects, instruments, procedures of data collection and analysis, the results and the discussion of the study. After the questionnaire is finished by the respondents, they are collected and handled by the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS 10.0) and Excel. The obtained data is analyzed by the Ridit test, which is appropriate for the survey study. The scores of Ridit are compared to see how frequently the subjects employ the reading strategies and whether there exists a correlation between the strategy use and gender. From the findings obtained through analysis and generalization, the thesis has drawn these elements concerning the use of the reading strategies as follows: 1) The subjects use every strategy mentioned in the questionnaire, but the frequency in which they use is medium. It is shown that the first-year Applied English majors in the junior college do not make full use of the reading strategies and they do not possess the ability to apply various strategies flexibly to their English reading. Among the six kinds of reading strategies, the frequency of the word-attack strategy is the highest while that of the structure analysis strategy is the lowest. 2) In the aspect of the difference between male and female students in using strategies, the results of the Ridit Test indicate that there is a strong correlation between male and female students in the use of most strategies and that there is the only difference between male and female students in different strategy preferences. The former is not in accord with one of the results obtained in the previous studies, i.e., females tend to use more strategies more frequently than males do. But the latter is consistent with one of the results obtained in the previous studies, i.e. males and females have different strategy preferences. 3) Although the subjects are aware of the importance of the reading strategies, it is very hard for them to apply the reading strategies to their English reading. The traditional teaching method, the long-time bad reading habits, and the present evaluation system, etc. might be the key factors accounting for the problems.In Chapter Four, the implications of the study, limitations as well as suggestions for future studies are presented. To better the current situation of EFL reading teaching, the author, based on the results of her study, ventures to bring forward some constructive suggestions: 1) Incorporate the reading strategies into the reading course;2) Adopt flexible teaching methods and learning activities to keep students motivated;3) Choose appropriate materials for different instructional tasks and activities to ensure students enough practice of reading strategy use; 4) Reform the evaluation system.The last part is the conclusion of the study.