A Study Of Reading Strategies For Secondary Vocational School Students

Secondary vocational education is an important component of secondary education, and secondary vocational school (SVS) students are a special group. There exist many differences between SVS students and senior middle school students in learning English. At present some English teachers still use "teacher—centered" teaching method, and focus on words, grammar and language knowledge in text reading teaching process.Teachers not only ignored fostering students' general comprehension abilities like understanding text organization and main information from the reading passages, but also neglected developing students' abilities of using reading strategies. Students'comprehension level is very low. Therefore, the thesis attempts to make a study of reading strategies used by SVS students.Since the 1960s, rising cognitive psychological theory views language learning as a complex cognitive process, and second language acquisition ( SLA) is also a psychological process of second language (L2) comprehension and production through consistent strategy application.Psychologists and linguists also view reading as a complex cognitive process, and it's both a method of learning and the purpose. Effective reading is closely related to the use of reading strategies. Johnson & Johnson (1998:333) thinks reading strategies are " an action process employed by readers for solving difficulties in reading." Scholars did a series of research on strategies. Research results indicated that the application and training of reading contributed to the reading competence. The training of strategies should be incorporated into reading instruction in classroom setting, and the training method should be explicit.All the reading strategy study in China is concerned with college students, adults or high school students. Until now little research has been done on reading strategies for SVS students of a typical group. Less study has been performed on three reading strategies including prediction, word-attack skills, skimming and scanning. However, at present there are some difficulties both in SVS reading teaching and in SVS students reading. The writers' SVS English teaching practice for ages confirmed that students' abilities in using three strategies are very poor. Therefore, the reading strategy studyinvolved in prediction, word-attack skill, skimming and scanning for SVS students is meaningful and worthwhile.With the theoretical guidance of learning strategies, reading strategies, reading models and the strategic training, a reading strategy quantitative study on prediction, word-attack skill, skimming and scanning was done for SVS freshmen from 3 classes in Wuhan No.l Light Industry School. The purpose is to know the general tendency of three strategies used by SVS students. And an strategy training contrast experiment was carried out in which two of 3 classes were treated as participants to prove strategic training assisted SVS students' reading competence.Research indicates that their use frequencies of three strategies are low, especially the prediction strategies. The study also reveals that strong readers use three strategies more and better than weak readers. It's suggested that training of reading strategies should incorporate reading strategy training into secondary vocational English reading classroom teaching, and construct certain strategy training-based English reading classroom teaching model. The strategic training -based reading classroom instruction model should be as follows: First step is prediction, then skimming, next scanning, word-attack skills penetrating the whole reading process. Last step is post-reading evaluation. In the meanwhile, application and training of the strategy assisted SVS students' reading abilities.