A Study Of The Relationship Between Reading Proficiency And Learning Strategies Used By Senior One EFL Students

The present study investigated the relationship of English reading proficiency and learning strategies used by Chinese Senior One students in order to find out if there is any significant correlation between English reading proficiency and strategy use and if there is any significant difference in strategy use across proficiency levels.The study was based on the classification of learning strategies proposed by O'Malley and Chamot, with metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies as the three categories of learning strategies. The participants selected were 100 students of two natural classes in Senior One. In order to assess students' English reading proficiency, scores of the reading comprehension part in their mid-term test English paper were used. According to the score of each student, the author grouped students into three levels. A self-designed 42-item questionnaire was administered to elicit data concerning students' strategy use. One-way ANOVA was used to provide evidence that there was significant difference in the reading scores among the three levels of students. A reliability assessment of the questionnaire was conducted by inspecting the item-total correlation. Then Pearson correlations were used to determine the strength of relationship between reading proficiency and learning strategies. One-way ANOVA by multiple comparisons using post-hoc test was used to identify whether there were significant differences of strategy use among three groups of students and where the differences lay. Finally, means of all the individual strategy items were compared across three reading proficiency level.It is found that English reading proficiency was significantly correlated with learning strategies (with the correlation coefficient being 0.287), and that students at high level used the three categories of learning strategies significantly more often than those at low level. The study has some implications for teaching reading and training reading strategies in middle schools.