An Investigation Into The Effects Of Reading Strategy Training On Chinese EFL High School Learners

Strategic research in reading has long been a focus of attention because it is assumed that success in reading mainly depends on appropriate strategy use and learners, especially the unsuccessful ones, can improve their reading by being trained to use effective strategies so that they can consciously take more responsibility of their own reading process and contribute to autonomy. Positive effects of strategy training in the fields of L1 and L2 reading have been claimed, whereas there have been relatively few studies to investigate the training effects on students'reading ability in an ongoing EFL classroom situation or, more specifically, in the Chinese EFL high school classroom context.This thesis presents a study of strategy training for reading and makes an attempt to explore the impact of the training methods on students'reading ability in a Chinese EFL high school classroom. The questions addressed in the current study include: 1. Does the explicit training of the strategies enhance EFL high school students'overall reading comprehension proficiency? 2. Which types of reading comprehension questions are affected by the training methods? 3. Does strategy training have a direct impact on students'reading fluency? 4. What are the students'attitudes toward the training experience and the usefulness of the strategies trained in this study?The study involves the training of four concrete reading strategies: skimming, scanning, making global inferences and making lexical inferences, and provides both awareness and practice for strategy use. 96 third-year students in two intact classes at High School Attached Bengang Gongxueyuan in Benxi City were either participants in the explicit reading strategy training that incorporated into the regular English instruction or were comparison students receiving the traditional way of teaching in the 12-week period. Both the experimental and the comparison groups were pre- and posttested with the same reading proficiency test that consisted of 40 multiple-choice reading comprehension questions taken from NMET 2002 (National Matriculation English Tests) and NMET 2003. The experimental group also filled out a posttraining questionnaire about their attitudes toward the usefulness of the four strategies and the training experience. After the training, data from the pre- and posttests, and the student questionnaire were collected and computed, and then analyzed by means of SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) 11.0. The main findings are as follows:1. It appears that the explicit training of reading strategies in the Chinese EFL high school classroom is successful in improving students'overall reading comprehension proficiency as confirmed by the significant differences between the training and non-strategy training conditions.2. The training methods utilized in this study have unequal influence on students'performance on different types of reading comprehension questions in the reading proficiency pre- and posttests. It appears that the students'abilities of grasping main ideas, making global and lexical inferences from both given passages and knowledge of the world are significantly enhanced, whereas their ability to locate specific information seems to be impervious to the training. 3. As for the students'reading fluency, the statistically significant increase of reading rate in the experimental group as compared with the non-strategy training group manifests the strong effects of the strategies trained in this study in helping students develop reading fluency.4. The post-training questionnaire reveals that the students take positive attitudes toward the training methods and the four strategies, indicating that such training activities are relatively safe to use in Chinese EFL high school classroom.The results of this study provide support for the educational value of reading strategy training in Chinese EFL high school classroom. These findings suggest that foreign language reading pedagogy, especially for adolescent and adult students in academic settings, would benefit from the incorporation of explicit and direct strategy training. Further, language teachers should make authentic and flexible use of the prescribed textbooks and reorient their roles in developing strategic and independent learners.