An Empirical Study On English Reading Strategy Training In High Schools

Since the mid-1970s, many researchers have paid attention to second language learning strategies. Many researches show that learning strategies can be taught. By teaching learning strategies, teachers help students improve their learning methods, guide them in their own choice of learning strategies to facilitate learning, and therefore cultivate their autonomy.Reading is one of the most important channels for language input in most Chinese classrooms. High school teachers are paying more and more attention to reading instruction. In China, many researchers and teachers find out that reading strategies play an important part in effective reading, but few studies are on the training pattern of reading strategies in high schools.After having studied the reading strategy training patterns carried out in China and abroad, the author finds that the pattern introduced by Joy Janzen and Fredericka L. Stroller—Integrating Strategic Reading in L2 Instruction (ISRI) can be adopted in high school training in China. So the following two hypotheses are put forward:1. The reading strategy training pattern based on ISRI can improve high school students' reading ability.2. The training will achieve different effects on students with different elementary knowledge.The author carried out the empirical study in a key school in Changsha. One hundred and fifteen Senior 2 students participated in it. The result is that after receiving the reading strategy training based on ISRI, the students in the experimental class made more significant progress than those in the control class. What's more, the efficient readers who have a good grasp of the elementary knowledge made more rapid progress than the inefficient readers who don't It verifies the hypotheses. Some pedagogical suggestions are proposed at last.Besides the introduction and the conclusion, this thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is a literature review. Chapter Two presents the research design. Chapter Three describes the steps of the reading strategy training in this research. Chapter Four compares the results from the pretest with those from the posttest, analyzes the data and makes a discussion. Chapter 6 proposes some pedagogical suggestions for the practical implementation of reading strategy training in high schools.