A Study On The Influence Of Chinese Reading Strategies On English Reading Strategies

Reading is an essential skill for EFL students. With strengthened reading skills, EFL readers will make greater progress and attain greater development in all academic areas. The studies on learning strategies in China can be traced back to 1984 (Wang Lifei & Wen Qiufang,2003), most of which mainly concern English learning strategies employed by Chinese students and the relationship between strategy use and language achievements. But researches on language strategy transfer are rather scarce, let alone reading strategy transfer.Specifically, the present study attempts to answer the following research questions:1. What kind of Chinese and English reading strategies do the Chinese EFL college learners frequently use? 2. Are there any significant differences between good and poor readers in their employment of Chinese and English reading strategies respectively? 3. Is Chinese reading strategy transferable to English reading? This research integrates both a quantitative and qualitative experiments to investigate the Chinese EFL learners'Chinese and English reading strategy use and aims to test the transferability from each individual's strategy use for reading Chinese to the process of English reading. Think-aloud protocol and questionnaire are adopted as the research methods and the experimental procedure is described meticulously.The results show:1. Strategies that help in constructing the meaning of the text are the most frequently used strategy by all the participants with different English proficiency; 2. The subjects at the higher proficiency level tend to use a wider range of strategies and not just a narrow set. The degree of strategy use closely correlates with reading performance.3. Students who can employ more Chinese reading strategies can also use English reading strategies more frequently. That is, most of the Chinese reading strategies, no matter what the extent is, can be successfully transferred into the reading practice in English.4. Participants of all proficiency level are not familiar with the concept and usage of metacognitive strategies and the different types of metacognitive strategies readers actually adopted are so limited that they do not know how to apply them effectively.Teaching students how to utilize the skills and knowledge they gain from their first language to improve reading comprehension, successfully orchestrate the use of strategies and how to monitor the reading process are some of the important elements that teachers must consider. However, the originality of this study lies not only in the attempt made by the author to probe the transferability of reading strategy use, but also to provide a suggestive three-step reading strategy instruction, based on the implications of the two experiments, with the help of think-aloud protocol. Through reforming the instruction model and focusing on training students'awareness of using reading strategies, the author wishes to find out a new way to enhance students'reading ability.