A Study Of Strategies-based Instruction On Junior Middle School Students' Reading Comprehension

The importance of learning strategy in foreign language learning is drawing increasing attention at the present time. The early study of learning strategy is mainly based on the good learner study, and it is commonly recognized that good language learners appear to use learning strategies more frequently and efficiently than those who are less successful. And later the focus of research falls on the validation, training and methods of learning strategy training. According to their reports, it is easily found out that appropriate and sufficient learning strategies application may lead to a better result and enable learners to become more successful in language learning.In Chinese EFL teaching, reading is acknowledged to be a prior language skill. In recent years, reading has already taken up a greater portion of the total score in the exams. More and more teachers paid great attaches to the training of reading. No matter how hard the teachers try, there are always some students who do poorly on reading tests. Up to date, the results are still not so satisfactory. In order to solve this problem, a great number of instructional models for foreign language strategy training programs have already been developed and put into practice. Among them the most effective program would most likely be strategies-based instruction, that is SBI for short. SBI is first proposed by Cohen in 1998. He believed that SBI would be an effective way to give students foreign language reading strategy training so as to improve their EFL reading comprehension.This thesis reports an experimental study of EFL strategy training. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the strategy training based on Cohen's Strategies-based instruction on junior middle school students'EFL reading comprehension. The research questions explored in this study are as follows:1. Does the strategy training approach based on Cohen's SBI enhance EFL junior middle school students'reading comprehension?2. If so, how is the effectiveness of strategy training related to students'reading proficiency?The subjects consisted of 82 junior two middle school students from two parallel classes of No.5 Middle School in Jinan. In the control class, no regular reading strategies instruction was implemented while in the experimental class, strategies-based instruction in reading was conducted regularly in the 3-month study. Besides, the two classes are classified into three proficiency levels on the basis of their reading performances in the pre-test. Two test papers are used to measure the subjects'reading performance, of which the mid-term exam paper is used as the pre-test paper and the final-term exam paper as the post-test one. The results are compared to examine the effects of learning strategies by one-way ANOVA and T-test in SPSS11.0.The study has reached the following conclusions:First, the implementation of the strategy training based on Cohen's SBI really improves junior middle school students'reading comprehension performance.Second, the implementation of SBI enhances students'reading comprehension at three levels, those with low proficiency improve the most, with intermediate the second and with high the least, which is in accordance with the findings of O'Malley and Chamot (1990).Based on this study, some pedagogical implications were drawn: It is necessary to implement the training of reading comprehension strategies on junior middle school students. Direct and Explicit strategy training should be included in everyday class. It is helpful to meet the needs of the students with different proficiency in the process of training.