A Study On English Reading Strategies Used By Students In Grade One Of Senior Middle School

Reading is an essential skill for English as second/foreign language students; and for many learners, reading is the most important skill to master. For a long period, reading plays an important part in English teaching and learning in middle school. However, language input depends more on classroom teaching and students'wide and effective reading. A serious problem of middle school English teaching is its low efficiency. Due to the deep-seated traditional teaching theories and methods, there are not many efforts to be made to the research of reading teaching. As a result, the teaching of reading in senior middle schools is not so satisfactory, and students have various difficulties in English reading comprehension in their studies and examinations. Students'reading barriers have directly influenced their integrating language competence. The problems of English reading among senior middle school students are serious and need to be improved as soon as possible.In recent years, researchers have highlighted the role that learning strategies are playing in language learning, such as Rubin(1975), Naiman(1978) and Stern(1975). They believe that proper introduction of strategic knowledge and strategy training for students is a key factor in improving their reading level. Reading strategies is always the core of language teaching and learning study. Reading strategies refer to strategies (such as inferencing, deduction, concentrating on reading and other strategies) used by language learners aiming to improve their reading comprehension. Hence research on reading strategies is of great importance in language learning as well as in language teaching. However, teachers in middle schools usually pay little attention to the teaching of reading strategies and skills. And most students know little about reading strategies, let alone how to use them, especially students in Grade One of senior middle schools, because they can change their learning strategies in junior school and can't adopt the way of learning in senior middle school. While reading plays very important role in senior middle school and senior one students think it most difficcult. Therefore, it is very important and efficient to study the reading strategy in Grade One of senior middle schools. This thesis is to research and analyze the situations of strategic knowledge in reading and reading strategy use for students in Grade One in Senior Middle School. After finding out their main reading barricades and the reading strategies they lack, the author makes some possible suggestions to help students not only realize where their reading difficulties are, but learn to adjust the proper reading strategies to solve the problems, and develop their abilities to find and solve the problems by themselves, thus result in the promotion of learner autonomy in language learning for students in senior high schools.The thesis consists of six parts. Part one is an introduction, which gives a brief account of the background of the researches concerning with this topic and points out the necessity and validity of carrying out this present study. In part two, literature review introduces some important theories in the research of language learning strategies, focusing on the definitions of learning strategies, the classifications of learning strategies, the factors that affect choice of language learning strategies,...