The Effect Of Strategy Training On Reading Scores

Strategic research in reading has long been a focus of attention because it is assumed that the successful reading mainly depends on appropriate application of strategies and learners, especially the high school students, can improve their reading by being trained to use effective strategies so that they can consciously take more responsibility for their own reading process and contribute to autonomy.Positive effects of strategy training in the fields of reading are relatively few, whereas there have been fewer studies to investigate the training effects on students' reading ability in an on-going classroom situation or, more specifically, in the Chinese high school classroom context. This thesis presents a study of strategy training for reading and makes an attempt to explore the impact of the training methods on students' reading ability in a Chinese high school classroom.The questions addressed in the current study include: 1. Does the explicit training of the strategies enhance high school students' overall reading comprehension scores? 2. Does strategy training have a direct impact on students' reading fluency? The study involves the training of four concrete reading strategies: skimming, scanning, making global inferences and making lexical inferences. 52 first-year students in two similar classes at No.16 High School were either participants in the explicit reading strategy training that incorporated into the regular English instruction or were comparison students receiving the traditional way of teaching in the 20-week period. Both the experimental and the comparison groups were pre and post tested with the same reading proficiency test that consisted of 20 multiple-choice reading comprehension questions taken from the city researching exams. The experimental group also filled out a post training questionnaire about their attitudes toward the usefulness of the four strategies and the training experience. After the training, data from the pre- and post tests, and the student questionnaire were collected and computed, and then analyzed by means of SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences). The main findings are as follows:The average scores are the same at the beginning.The experiment class reading average score is much higher than the comparison one at the end of the experiment. The experiment class reading times average score is larger than the comparison one. The Std. Deviation of experiment class and comparison class is in the scope of allowance. The two Pearson Correlations are both above 0. The post-training questionnaire reveals that the students take positive attitudes toward the training methods and the four strategies, indicating that such training activities are relatively safe to use in Chinese high school classroom.