A Study Of Effectiveness Of Reading Strategies Training In Senior School

As reading is an important way of inputting in learning a foreign language, it plays a key role in English teaching in senior schools. In the National Matriculation English Test, reading is the main method to test students' English ability. How to improve the students' English reading skill has long been a common concern of researchers and English teachers. In the early times, researchers had paid great attention to the study of teaching to find the most efficient method to improve English reading. However, they have not found perfect methodologies so far. Since the 1970s, the focus of research has been shifted form "how to teach" to "how to learn". Then teachers begin to realize that training learners to know how to read is more important than the search for good teaching method.With the aim to adapt to the new teaching environment and to improve the English reading skill of senior school students, this study investigates the effect of the reading strategies training on students' reading ability. According to the demand of The New English Curriculum Standard, the characteristics of reading comprehension questions of the NMET, and the research into the students' need and the strategies they have used, this study focuses on the investigation of the effects of training in four reading strategies (skimming, scanning, word meaning inference and global inference).According to Anderson's model of stagewise skill acquisition, learning strategies as a complex skill usually is not formed automatically but isproceduralized from declarative knowledge via the three steps of cognitive stage, associative stage and autonomous stage. So in the study the author has followed the following four steps: a. preparing for the training, b. presenting and modeling the target reading strategies, c. practicing the target strategies, d. reflecting the strategies training.The study obtains the following findings.1) The reading strategies training within the suggested training framework could improve the students' reading comprehension.2) The reading ability of the students in the low proficiency group improved the most.3) The strategy training greatly enhanced the students' ability to grasp the main ideas of texts, make global inferences and make lexical inferences, look for facts or details.The experiment result shows that the students will benefit a lot from the reading strategies training, in other ways, reading strategies training proves to be an effective way to improve senior school students' reading comprehension.