A Study On Strategic EFL Reading Behavior With Reference To Senior High Students

Recently, scholars in foreign countries investigated the difference of reading strategy use between successful learners and less successful learners, and summarized the reading strategies used by successful readers, such as Papalia (1983), Oxford (1990) who put forward 50 reading strategies. In China, Wen Qiufang (1995) studied learning strategies, Liu Yichun (2002) investigated the difference of reading strategy use between successful learners and less successful learners and Li Wenqiong (2004) researched on the difference of reading strategy use between successful learners and less successful learners in senior high schools. However, their research only focuses on the learners'reading strategy use. In this study, teachers'support of strategic reading behaviors is also discussed on the basis of learners'reading strategy use. This study tries to answer the following three questions:1) To what extent do high school students purposely use reading strategies?2) To what extent do high school teachers support the development of strategic reading behavior?3) How to make under-used reading strategies accessible to high school students?The research results showed that senior high students did not frequently employ reading strategies, and the teachers took some steps to support strategic reading behaviors but they did not apply these steps systematically. Furthermore, the results also showed that helping students be aware of strategies in general can be the first step to make under-used reading strategies accessible. According to the results of the analysis of differences of reading strategy use between students with high, medium, and low-proficiency, the author puts forward the following recommendations: developing the subcomponents of reading abilities, activating the learner'self-access of EFL reading and instructing reading strategies explicitly.