Study On Cognitive Strategies Of Junior Middle School Students In English Reading

In the last few decades, many researchers have been focusing on learning strategies. The task of the New English Curriculum Standards (2001) is to develop not only the students' language knowledge and skills but also a good learning habit and strategy. Learning strategy can be the insurance of improving the students' learning proficiency and developing their ability of autonomous study. The present study aims at one of the learning strategy categories—cognitive strategies and their application in reading for Grade Eight students. The research instruments are a set of English reading test papers and a Strategy Inventory for Language Learning. The hypotheses of this thesis are as follows : (1) The English reading achievement of Experimental Group is higher than that of Control Group through cognitive-strategies-based instruction; (2) The students in Experimental Group employ cognitive strategies in reading more frequently than those in Control Group through cognitive-strategies-based instruction; (3) The effective students in Experimental Group employ more cognitive strategies than the ineffective students through cognitive-strategies-based instruction.In this thesis we present learning strategies, cognitive strategies and relevant survey in this regard in China and abroad. The theoretical bases of this study are three cognitive theories: Gestalt psychology, Ausubel's theory of meaningful learning and Anderson's cognitive theory of language learning. Then come the procedures , hypotheses, subjects, methods, instruments and the role of teachers in strategies-based instruction.Software SPSS 12.0 is employed to analyze the data. The results are concored with the three hypotheses above.The result suggests that explicit cognitive strategies instruction has positive impact on students' reading ability. Through cognitive strategies instruction, the experimental group can make some progress in reading, and the experimental group employ cognitive strategies in reading more frequently. In a word, the cognitive strategies-based instruction is helpful to improving the students' reading proficiency. The characteristic of this study is that it can integrate the cognitive strategies into English reading. It can be widely used in middle schools.