A Study On Strategy Training In English Reading Comprehension In Senior Middle School

In the 21^st century, English teaching in senior middle schools in China is facing many new challenges. Communication in economy and science with other countries becomes more frequent than before. English plays a much more important role in people's daily life. According to the New National Standard for English Curriculum, the purpose of English teaching in senior middle school is to improve the students' four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing with the base of necessary phonetics, large vocabularies ,good grammar and culture awareness. And at the same time equipped them with learning strategies and enable them to develop intercultural competence. And it also points out that reading is one of the most critical goals in middle school English teaching. As we all know reading is the most important way of gaining information . So people pay more and more attention to reading strategy training .The strategy training method has been widely used in preparation programs in training business people, lawyers, and doctors, but it has rarely been used by senior students. This study was designed to examine (1) whether senior middle school students can handle strategy training method, and (2) whether the strategy training was effective in improving senior middle school students' reading comprehension . Our hypothesis was that senior middle school students are able to handle the strategy and that the strategy training would be effective in improving students' reading comprehension.In the experiment, 88 middle school students in grade one from two classes are assigned to two treatment groups (the strategy group and the control group). The strategy group has 45 students and the control group has 43 students. The study lasted two months with the beginning and the ending week allocated to testing. Three hours of instruction occurred each week. In the test, students' studying ability, reading ability and reading attitude are observed and recorded.Chapter 1 consists of the background of this study: its theoretical framework; the statement of the problem; definition of terms; the objectives of this study; the research questions; methodology and data analysis and the significance of the study. Chapter 2contains a review of the related literature and research about strategy training in middle school including: traditional views on reading comprehension, cognitively based views, strategic reading, and students and teachers' effect in developing strategy training. Chapter 3 gives details of the methods and procedure for data collection and analysis used for the study. Instrumentation, sampling, data collection and data analysis are incorporated. Chapter 4 provides an analysis of the data collected through this research and discusses the results. Chapter 5 contains a summary of the study and its findings, the conclusions drawn, the limitations of this study, and suggests implications for English educational practices and for future research. The bibliography, acknowledgement and appendices follow this chapter.Findings from this study demonstrate that (1) middle school students could learn to use the reading strategy in English learning, and (2) the strategy training was more effective in improving students' reading comprehension. The students in the strategy group exhibited stronger performance on the comprehension test and suffered the least loss between the two groups when external conditions were disruptive. The findings also support the knowledge that reading strategies can be taught to students using direct and explicit instructional methods. The strategy group did better than the control group on the transfer comprehension test.