The Application Of Reading Strategies In The Teaching Of English Reading To Senior Middle School Students

Reading is an essential and important skill for English learners. In senior middle schools, improving students'reading comprehension ability is one of the major achievements in English teaching. However, after three years'study, many middle school students do not have any obvious improvement in English reading. Many senior high school students'reading ability is far below where it should be, and the discrepancy between them is great. This has drawn close attention of many teachers and researchers working in this field. They believe that proper introduction of strategic knowledge and strategy training for students is a key factor in improving students'reading level.This thesis is to research and analyze the situations of strategic knowledge in reading and reading strategy use for Mongolian senior high students. Two classes of senior grade one in Senior High School Attached to Inner Mongolia Normal University were taken as the subjects, one as experimental class and the other as control class. 40 students of the experimental class received a 4-month strategy training while 40 students of the control class still received traditional teaching for 4 months. Both of two classes filled out questionnaire before and after training. Besides, all the subjects took the pre-test and post-test . The scores were statistically analyzed by SPSS. The result showed that the students who received strategy training outperformed those who received traditional teaching on a standardized reading test. It proves that strategy instruction does facilitate students'reading comprehension. Also, the more strategies students use, the more positive attitude towards English reading they have. After finding out their main reading barricades and the reading strategies they lack, the author makes some possible suggestions to help students not only realize where their reading difficulties are, but learn to adopt the proper reading strategies to solve the problems, and develop their abilities to find and solve the problems by themselves, thus result in the promotion of reading ability and learner autonomy in language learning for students in senior high schools.Five Sections are included in the thesis paper.The First Part introduces a brief analysis of studies related to the improvement of senior high school students'reading ability.The Second Part is about literature review that introduces some important theories in the research of language learning strategies, focusing on the definitions of learning strategies, the classifications of learning strategies, the factors that affect choice of language learning strategies, learning strategy training, and the definitions of reading and reading strategies. All the theories mentioned in this chapter are theoretical support to the study of the thesis.The Third Part introduces the procedures of the experiment.The Fourth Part is concerned with data analysis and findings from the questionnaire and the experiment.The Fifth Part draws a conclusion. The author presents discussions to elicit some solutions to the reading problems and states the pedagogical implications in English reading learning and teaching, and the limitations of the study are also mentioned here.