Senior High School Students' Reading Strategy Training Through English Newspapers

Reading is the main approach of obtaining information in EFL context. Being an important receptive skill, it undoubtedly becomes one of the most important aspects in English learning and teaching. A student's success in school and throughout life depends in large part on his or her ability to read. The information age requires that students become willing, competent and efficient readers. So there is keen awareness that English teaching must therefore focus on providing possible reading strategy instruction.However, for a long time in China, the teaching of English reading has been guided by the belief that language is only a set of grammar rules. The teacher-centered and grammar-oriented perspective leads to the emphasis on grammatical competence, which results in the inefficiency of reading teaching.The importance and necessity of reading strategy training are shown in the new curriculum, related textbooks and the latest entrance examinations. With such enlightenment, the present dissertation endeavored to probe into the combination of the reading strategy training and the exploration of English newspapers. It reports on a study of reading strategy training via learner-centered classroom activities based on English newspapers "21st Century Teens" in an ongoing senior English classroom and investigates the effects of the training on students' reading ability. The research questions for this study are: 1. What kind of reading strategies will be developed after reading instruction and strategy training by using newspapers in the classroom? 2. To what extent is reading comprehension ability related to reading strategies? 3. In which way is newspaper reading effective to the strategy training? The study began with a questionnaire and a pre-study reading test, of which the purpose was to obtain the general reading strategy awareness and the reading ability of the 50 participants and to serve as "baseline data" on reading knowledge.The quantitative analysis of questionnaire was used to provide a comprehensive picture of the reading strategy awareness of high school students. The analysis indicated that students' inadequate and uncertain reading strategy knowledge and application resulted in their poor reading proficiency.After the completion of reading strategy instruction and training via reading activities based on English newspapers, a post-study reading test was carried out and a comparison was made. Answers to the research questions were found from the results which showed that strategy training was effective in enhancing EFL middle school students' overall reading proficiency and reading speed. The training, to different degrees, had effect on the improvement of students' abilities to grasp main ideas, to make global inferences and to extract detailed information; however, it had no obvious effect on the improvement of their ability to guess unknown vocabulary. The interview after the study revealed that students took positive attitudes towards the training of reading strategies through English newspapers, indicating that such training activities can be used in high school classroom.Overall, the research in this dissertation demonstrated the general state of Chinese high school students' reading strategy awareness and tried to explore a more effective approach to developing reading strategy and proficiency via English newspapers. In spite of its limitations, the study can act as an attempt and encouragement for peers to be aware of the importance of reading strategy training and exploring the newspaper as a valuable teaching resource.