On The Relationship Between Senior High Students' EFL Reading Strategy Application And Reading Achievements

Language researchers and language teachers have found language learning strategies prominent among various factors affecting foreign language learning. Both domestic and foreign researchers have conducted substantial research on learning strategies ever since 1970s. Improving the students'English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reading ability has been an important task of English language teaching (ELT) in senior middle schools, and EFL reading strategy training is a major concern of The National English Curriculum for Senior Middle School students. However, domestic researchers focus their study on students at the tertiary level, whereas studies targeted at senior high school students are scarce.The present study is to explore reading strategies employed by senior high school EFL students and to examine the effect of the strategy training on their reading achievements.The purposes of this study are to investigate the characteristics of English reading strategies used by senior high school students, to detect the differences in strategy use between high and low achievement groups, and to examine the correlation between their reading strategy employment and English achievements, in the hope of exploring the contribution of English reading strategies to English achievements. The data are collected mainly through a written questionnaire, and partly by means of group interviews.This study is based on the EFL Reading Strategy Inventory for Senior Middle School Students (ERSISMiSS), taking into consideration the Curriculum, Oxford (1990), Andersen (1999) etc. Acquired data is analyzed with Statistics Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) 11.5. The ERSISMiSS has 66 statements with two major categories (Cognitive and Metacognitive) and 12 sub-categories. It is administered to 127 Senior Three students, 64 of whom are in the Experimental Group and 63 in the Control Group. This thesis aims to address the following three questions:1. Is there a statistically significant relationship between Chinese Senior Three students'reported frequency of EFL reading strategy and their reading achievements?2. What are the differences in strategy use between good and poor English reading groups?3. Will EFL reading strategy training affect the students'EFL reading strategy and their EFL reading achievements?After both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data, the study reaches the following findings:1. There is no statistically significant relationship between reported frequency of reading strategy and the pre-test scores, but there is a statistically significant relationship between reported frequency of reading strategy and the post-test reading proficiency.2. There is no statistically significant difference in EFL reading strategy between good and poor readers.3. EFL reading strategy training has fairly great effect on students'strategy use and their reading proficiency, but short-term training has greater effect on their cognitive strategy use.4. Students with high English achievements have a better command over English reading strategies than those with low English achievements.5. All the six reading strategy categories except compensation strategies significantly correlate with English achievements. Reading strategies as a whole possess a moderately predictive power on English achievements. Moreover, memory and metacognitive strategies are positive predictors with statistical significance.6. English reading strategy is important to students'reading achievements and metacognitive strategy is the vital factor. It is necessary to improve students'awareness of reading strategy and reading effectiveness.The students in the strategy group exhibited stronger performance on the comprehension test and suffered less loss between the two groups when external conditions were disruptive.The findings also support the knowledge that reading strategies can be taught to students with direct and explicit instructional methods. The strategy group did better than the control group on the transfer comprehension test.This thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the research background. Chapter 2 reviews the literature on EFL reading strategies, both at home and abroad. Chapter 3 outlines the research methodology, including the research setting, sampling, research questions, research procedures, instrumentation, data collection and data analysis procedures and so on. Chapter 4 analyses the collected data and presents insights based on the analysis.Chapter 5 contains a summary of the study and its findings, the conclusions drawn, the limitations of this study, and suggests implications for English reading training and for future research. The references and appendices follow this chapter.