A Study Of Reading Strategy From The Contextual Perspective And Improvement Of English Reading Ability

Reading has been simply recognized as a decoding process, which deeply influences the teaching of reading in our country. Even nowadays, adopting a grammatical approach to teach reading is still very popular in English class, which makes most students think that large vocabulary and the knowledge of various syntactic structures are the most important factors which influence reading comprehension. Thus, the methods that they usually adopt to improve their reading ability include memorizing new words as many as possible and mastering all kinds of syntactic structures. While reading, they try to identify every word with those words in their memory and try hard to work out the structure of each sentence they read. However, those strategies turn out to be not as effective as they expected.Reading and context are closely associated with each other. Reading material itself is a kind of context, and the activity of reading also takes place in certain context. Thus, as reading is talked about, context should absolutely be taken into consideration. In this thesis, a new reading strategy is put forward and studied: to read in context.This thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter is a general introduction of the whole thesis, which includes research background, research significance and research purpose.Chapter Two offers a literature review about learning strategy and reading comprehension, which involves the definitions and classification of language learning strategy as well as the definition of reading comprehension and introduces the process of reading comprehension.Chapter Three introduces theories about context and reading strategy. In this chapter, different opinions on the definition and classification of context are introduced. Based on the previous studies, the author presents her own classification of context, which is applied in this thesis. In addition, this chapter reviews some significant researches and theories on the adequacy of contextual cues, which is the basis of the present study. Reading strategy is another focus of this chapter. The definition and classification of it are reviewed. Besides, the correlation between context and reading strategy is discussed in this chapter.Chapter Four focuses on how the five kinds of context, morphological context, semantic context, genre, organizational pattern and background knowledge, effectively facilitate reading comprehension.In Chapter Five, an experimental study is carried out to test two hypotheses: with contextual cues being adequate,1.) students who receive proper instruction of contextual awareness score higher in completing reading comprehension task;2.) not all types of reading comprehension questions can be satisfactorily answered after the instruction of contextual awareness.After analyzing the data by SPSS and discussing the results of the study, the implications and some suggestions on how to enhance students'contextual awareness are provided.Finally, the conclusion of this thesis is drawn as follows. With contextual cues being adequate,1.) the students who receive the instruction of contextual awareness do score significantly higher in completing reading tasks than those who do not, thus the instruction does positively influence reading comprehension;2.) the instruction of contextual awareness can indeed help deal with questions about'vocabulary'and'inference', but it is not much helpful in answering questions about'details'and'main idea'. Therefore, this strategy is only effective for some types of reading questions not for all.