Business English Reading Strategies: A Study Of Chinese Adult EFL Learners

This thesis is an empirical research of an investigation into Business English reading strategies used by Chinese adult EFL learners.It aims at exploring what reading strategies are employed by these learners when reading a BE text;whether relative business background knowledge will have an impact on these learners' use of reading strategies and on their BE reading test scores.This thesis first introduces the theories of learning strategies,reading comprehension and business English,especially Oxford's theory of learning strategies and Rumelhart's schema theory and then presents the theoretical basis of the current study and point out the importance of background knowledge in BE reading.Oxford's learning strategy can be divided into memory,metacognitive,cognitive,compensation, affective and social strategies.There are three kinds schema:linguistic,content and formal.Afterwards,the research design is described in detail,including the choice of research subject and the research instruments.The research subjects are 54 adult learners majoring in Business English.The instalments of this study are a Business English Reading Strategy Questionnaire,one BE reading comprehension test and interviews.Then in chapter 4,results and discussion are submitted to provide some explanations for the research findings yielded in the study.Finally,conclusions and implications are put forward,followed by suggestions and the limitations of this study.The author,with the help of SPSS 16.O,conducts analyses of comparison of means,t-test and correlations.The results indicate:1) compared with adult BE learners who have less or no relative business background knowledge,adult BE learners who have relative business background knowledge tend to use more metacognitive strategies and perform better in BE reading comprehension test;2) reading scores obtained from the BE reading test are moderately correlated with scores of perceived metacognitive strategies use;3) the role of background knowledge has not been fully attached importance to;4) the awareness of reading strategies is still not strong among adult Business English learners.Therefore,we believe that enhancing the accumulation of relative background knowledge and the use of reading strategies will improve BE reading.