A Study In The Reading Strategy Use And Training In Senior High School

Reading is an essential and important skill for English as foreign language students. In senior middle school, improving students' reading comprehension ability is one of major achievements in English teaching. However, after three years' study, many middle school students have not obvious improvement in English reading. On the contrary, more and more students become less and less interested in English learning. Many senior Middle English teachers face many challenges, one of which is that many students are not active with the text in a meaningful way and much of their reading is not influent. Although they spend much time in English reading, the result is not satisfactory. More and more researchers and teachers focus on the solution to the problem.Since the 1970s, second language research interest has shifted from how to teach to how to learn. Researchers pay more attention to learning process. So there has been a great upsurge in research on second language learning strategies. Researchers try to find out a solution to the problem on reading difficulty by studying reading strategies use and training. From the view of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology this paper reviewed the literature of reading theories and reading models. It also reviewed the literature of the previous research or reading strategies. Based on these theory frames, a ten-week experiment was carried out in order to probe into the effectiveness of strategy training. The experiment was designed to answer the following questions.1) Is there any difference between efficient and non-efficient readers in strategy use in English reading? 2) Can reading comprehension ability be improved by strategy training? The experimentwas divided into two phase. In the first phase I designed a questionnaire in order to find out the difference between the efficient and non-efficient readers in reading strategy use on English reading. The result showed that there was no significant difference between these two groups. In the second phase I carried out strategy training. Two classes participated in the experiment. One is an experimental class, receiving strategy training on reading while the other (control group) didn't. By comparing the results of the pretest and posttest by the two groups, the effectiveness of strategy training was examined. The result of data analysis indicated that 1) reading competence can be improved by strategy training. It also showed that integrating the strategy training into the routine training was quite feasible and effective.Thesis paper is organized as follows:Chapter One introduces the general goal of the present research.Chapter Two reviewed the literature closely related to the present study. Reading is cognitive activity, about which there have been various hypotheses concerning its nature and process, for instance, Gough's bottom-up model, top-down model and interactive models.Chapter Three introduces the procedures of the experiment.Chapter Four is concerned with data analysis and findings from the questionnaire and the experiment.Cheaper Five draws a conclusion from the experiment with the discussion on its pedagogical implications.