Foreign Language Reading Strategies And Individual Differences

Content: Besides the knowledge of readers, the foreign language field generally believes that the process of reading is affected by many other factors, such as personal experiences, subjective attitude, emotion and so on. In the process of learning a foreign language, learners show great individual differences. This study intends to investigate the relationship between the factors above and foreign language reading strategies, and what teachers should do in coping with the differences to enhance the level of the students' reading ability. For many years, scholars have made many deep studies in the reading strategy field. However, most studies are conducted in the West with foreign students learning Indo-European languages as the subjects of the experiments. In China, although some relevant studies have also been done, these studies seldom focus on high school students and they also neglect the affect of individual differences on reading strategies. This situation has stimulated the author's interest to make a further investigation on tibe untouched areas in this field. The main findings are as follows:The level of using reading strategies in Chinese senior high students is normal. Thebest used strategies are :'browsing the general meaning of the whole passage', 'noting themain points in class' and 'understanding the general meaning of the passage'. However, incontrast with these, the badly used strategies are: 'inferring according to the grammar rules','getting down reading notes'and'finding out the innerest details ' .Among a spectrum of reading strategies, there are significant positive correlation between most reading strategies and intelligence. The most efficient strategies are: 'inferring new words according to the context', 'possessing a large number of vocabulary' and 'referring dictionary contextually'. On the other hand, the most unsuccessful strategies are : 'getting down reading notes', 'questioning oneself to test whether understanding or not' and 'remembering the content of the text'. In addition, time exposure and reading strategies are positive correlated, but not so obvious.The differences are significant in the relationship between reading strategies and these factors like metacognition, contentment of oneself in English learning, belief of the importance of reading, demanding of oneself and interest There are also positive correlation between character, motivation and reading strategies, but not so obvious. There exits correlation between the style of cerebrum, cognition and some reading strategies for example: learners who are good at using the left half of their cerebrums can find the details in the text more easily.In terms of reading strategies, female learners are better man male learners in getting down notes. They are also much more interested in English reading than male learners and they have more vocabulary as well. Students from Guang dong province are better than those from Jiang xi province in some reading strategies. However, in contrary, there is negative correlation between age and some reading strategies, which is discrepant with the previous studies in the field. As far as teaching is concerned, it is also correlated obviously with reading strategies, just as is known. Learners' advantages of learning English are correlated with reading strategies significantly.