A Comparative Study Of Reading Strategies Used By Senior High School Students

Learning strategy is an important part of the Second Language Acquisition(SLA) research and has received more attention in China because Chinese students spend lots of time and energy in learning English but they benefit not so much as compared with the investment. Reading, under the present foreign language environment in our country, is the most important element in language learning and language acquisition for only when students can be led to the real environment of language and be exposed to the target language environment, can they turn their language knowledge into their language ability. From this point of view, the study on reading strategies is an indispensable part of Chinese foreign language teaching study. Especially the comparison of successful and unsuccessful readers will provide more evidence for reading strategy training and shed light on the study of Chinese students' language learning.This paper first reviewed the literature of English language learning strategies so as to clarify the basic concepts in this field, and then the focus narrowed down to the field of the reading strategy, its definition, classification and former relevant studies. After that, it presented the results of the study designed to investigate the reading strategies used by two Grade-two classes in a senior high school. A questionnaire and reading achievement tests were first given respectively to collect quantitative data. Interviews were conducted afterwards to provide qualitative data. The study laid special emphasis on the differences in reading strategies used by the successful and the unsuccessful learners. Later, small-scale reading strategy training was carried out to testify whether the strategies used by the successful readers were also effective ones to those who were not good at reading.The findings indicate that senior high school students use an extensive variety of reading strategies in spite of the fact that the frequency of reading strategy use on the whole is relatively low and there is huge potential for students to improve their reading strategy use. Further research has also found that cognitive reading strategies have the most significant positive relation with the reading achievement test scores, followed by metacognitive reading strategies. With a comparison of the strategies used by the successful and the unsuccessful readers, this study shows that they differ significantly in the use of cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies. The Successful readers are better at monitoring and evaluating their reading process. They are more able to reflect on and monitor their cognitive processes while reading. Meanwhile, they will employ more prediction and background knowledge, common sense and similar life experience, to facilitate reading process. They will not only elicit information from the text but also actively combine relative background knowledge with the text to accomplish a comprehensive communication with the writer. On the contrary, owing to weak linguistic foundation and lack of extensive reading, the unsuccessful readers are generally deficient in reading strategies and seldom use the strategies consciously and effectively. In the process of reading, they decode the text in small units and receive the given information passively, making no effort to guess the unstated facts and implied meanings.Finally, small-scale reading strategy training was carried out in the subjects' spare time. The enrolled eleven students were divided into two groups: the five students in the Experiment Group received reading strategy training for six weeks while the six students in the Control Group received the traditional teaching method. The feedback of the subjects shows that the experiment is effective, which indicates that reading strategy training should be introduced to senior high school urgently and that teachers have the responsibility to help students raise their awareness of reading strategy use and to provide strategy instruction into the classroom as a part of the reading curriculum.