Investigation And Study On Relationship Between Reading Strategies And Reading Ability Among Students In Senior Schools

In the 21st 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 to equip 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. But unfortunately, the phenomenon of"high input and low output"is still in common in teaching of reading. When people probe into the reasons, it is related to the reading concept which is unilateral and at the same time, it is because learners can not grasp and use reading strategies properly. Thus, in order to obtain good effects of reading and ideal reading speed, it is necessary to make a clear picture of structures and features of psychology in the process of reading, and on the basis of it, there is a great need for developing reading habits and effective reading strategies consciously, but to reach the goals, learners are required to be trained necessarily in the application of reading strategies. Only in this way is it likely that learners can use the effective reading strategies correctly.Reading strategies in English are a part of English learning strategies, there have been 30 years in studies on learning strategies. Making a general survey of studies on learning strategies abroad, main problems are referred to in the following aspects: 1) strategies applied by good language learners; 2) differences between good learners and poor learners; 3) relationship between use of strategies and learning results of the second language(L2); 4) language learning training and its effect. Compared with studies on learning strategies abroad, studies on learning strategies in china are more focused on introduction and description of learning strategies theoretically, as for the effect of strategy training, it is mostly concentrated on the college level. English learning strategies and strategy training in middle school are still in the beginning stages. So, this thesis intends to make an attemptable study of the English reading strategies and strategy training in middle school.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 present study, about 100 senior middle school students were chosen as the subjects from two intact classes (Class One was randomly assigned as the controlled class, Class Two as the experimental class) in Panjin Senior Middle School in Panjin City. Based on the results of initial investigation on the students' learning strategies by using Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (Oxford. 19891), and the model of Brown and Palincsar 's training in reading (1984), reading strategy training was performed in the experimental class for 24 weeks, while in the controlled class, the conventional reading teaching method (grammar-translation method) was conducted. The data collected were students' initial investigation (pre-test )and post investigation (post-test )on reading strategies. And all the data were calculated by SPSS (Statistical Program for Social Science) 11.0. The results indicate that the Senior Middle School students can obtain enough effective reading strategies after reading strategy training, and that the effective reading strategies can help students improve their reading comprehension and reading speed.The present thesis is composed of seven parts. Part One is an introduction which mainly depicts the purpose and the significance of the present study. Part Two is literature review which chiefly looks back on the development of researches on English learning strategies abroad and in China. Part Three is about theories of reading, reading strategies and reading strategy training. Part Four covers details in the experiment, which consists of the hypothesis of the present study, the materials used in the experiment, the subjects, the procedure, the method and the model in reading training. Part Five is the data collection and the data analysis. Part Six is the discussion, which indicates that the reading strategies play an important role in improving English reading comprehension, and that the reading strategy training is an effective way in enhancing students' reading comprehension. Part Seven covers limitations and implications.