A Study Of Senior High School EFL Students' Reading Strategies

Reading is an essential skill for English as second/foreign language students. In the ESL/EFL teaching domain, reading is not only one of the important skills, but also the main channel to attain information. Reading is considered the most important subject in Chinese EFL teaching of senior high school. More teaching periods are devoted to reading. The curriculum arrangement and textbook compilation are greatly concerned on reading. What should be thought about, however, is that although we spend more time and efforts on reading, the results of teaching are not satisfying. The main purpose of the present study is to explore learning strategies for reading employed by senior high school EFL students and to examine the effect of the strategy training on English reading achievement.The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter one is the introduction, discussing the necessity of studying learning strategies for reading and introducing the purpose and significance of the present study. Some important terms concerning the present study are also explained.Chapter two is the literature review, exploring the theoretical framework for the study of EFL reading strategies after a overall review of language learning strategies, models of the reading comprehension process and some empirical studies relevant to the present study.Chapter three focuses on the research methods. The study consists of three phases. The first phase is mainly a questionnaire investigation, which examines the frequency and range of reading strategies use and the relationship between reading strategies use and the reading proficiency of 346 senior high school EFL students in Daqing, Heilongjiang Province. The second phase aims at finding out the details of the differences in reading strategy use between different group students by individual interviews. The last phase is about strategy training.Chapter four reports the data analyses and discusses the results of this study.Chapter five briefly summarizes the major findings of the present study. According to the findings of this study, some suggestions for learning and teaching and some inherent limitations are proposed.