A Study On The Application Of Reading Strategies In Senior English Reading Teaching

With the development of communication in science and technology with other countries, people have realized English is more and more important. According to the New National Standard for English Curriculum, the purpose of English teaching in senior middle school is to improve the students' four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, with the base of necessary phonetics, large vocabularies, good grammar and culture awareness. And at the same time equipped them with learning strategies and enable them to develop intercultural competence. And it also points out that reading is one of the most critical goals in middle school English teaching. Since the 1970s, studies in English teaching and learning have shifted their main concern from teachers' teaching to students' learning. Increasing numbers of studies have been undertaken from the students' perspective. These studies have uncovered the fact that learners can be trained to take more responsibility for how and what they learn. It is thought that much of the responsibility for successful language learning depends on language learners' individual ability to learn rather than the teacher's ability to teach. Therefore, many linguists and researchers engaged in studying L2 teaching and learning have focused their study upon the notion of learning strategies.As we all know, reading is one of the most critical goals in middle school English teaching, and also the most important way of gaining information. Reading effectively can help learners gain much information. So people pay more and more attention to reading strategy training. Reading strategies are learning strategies which are consciously selected by learners to improve their reading comprehension and reading proficiency. They play an important role in effective reading. But the fact is that although great emphasis was put upon reading in Chinese English reading teaching, the results are not very satisfactory. Students' attention in reading is mainly paid to the mechanical memorization of grammatical rules and vocabularies, analysis of sentence structures, and even translation of the passages. Some students can understand all words but not the whole meaning. Some of them even consider extra-curriculum reading as "waste of time", as it is irrelevant to their examinations. The inefficient way of learning English is a common phenomenon for senior students, which is reflected in their poor reading comprehension. Therefore, it is necessary for researchers to make investigations into students' reading process, which gives rise to studies on reading strategies.