A Research Of Reading Strategies In High School English Learning

Reading is the most important purpose and also the most important means of language learning. Reading strategies refer to strategies used by language learners aiming to improve their reading comprehension, which not only deal with some certain reading skills but also the selecting and controlling activities of carrying out a certain reading aim. In recent years, more and more researchers have been done in this field . It is thought that the strategy use matters much with the reading effects. Thus research on reading strategies is of great importance in language learning. The present study intends to investigate reading strategies employed by the Chinese high school students who learn English as a second language from a cognitive perspective. The author attempts to find out the difference in reading strategies among the different level students after they have finished their reading strategy training .The following questions are to be answered.1. Does strategy training improve the reading ability of high school ESL learners?2. How is the effectiveness of reading strategy training related to the reading proficiency of the students?3. Which kinds of reading comprehension are affected by reading strategy training?The study was carried out in Donghai Senior Middle School in Jiangsu Province. 50 students (24 boys and 26 girls) were chosen as subjects who were divided into three groups according to their reading proficiency in English. In this study, a reading proficiency pre-test and post-test were given to the students.Computer program SPSS and T test were utilized to investigate if there were significant differences after their reading strategy training ,And the major findings of the present study are :1. Reading strategy training plays an important role in EFL reading.2. The effectiveness of the strategy training varies with the students' reading proficiency; Especially the low proficiency group improves the most, followed by the intermediate proficiency group and the high proficiency group.3. Reading strategy training can improve students' performance on some kinds of reading comprehension questions.The present study aims to offer some valuable datas and information for the high school English teaching and also do some basic work for the future research of reading strategies.This thesis is composed of the following five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction, which gives a brief account of the reasons why this research was done and points out the necessity and validity of carrying out this present research. Chapter two mainly builds up the theoretical position of language learning strategies from the view of language earning theories and its goals. In this part author points out that language learning is a process of interactive use of declarative and procedural knowledge and a processes of solving problems. Chapter three provides a detailed discussion about models of second language reading. Then it illustrates the factors influencing L2 reading proficiency. Finally, some previous studies on use of reading strategies are also stated. Chapter four focuses on the course of the present study. The author introduces the study methods, the subject selection, the data collection, the procedure and describes the results of the study and the analysis of the results. The last chapter of this thesisconcludes the research and gives some advice to the teachers on how to improve the students' reading ability further as well as some advice on the future research in this field.