An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Reading Strategy Training On Chinese Senior High School Learners

Reading, an important way of acquiring and exchanging information for learners, is one of the most essential and important skills in foreign language learning. Therefore, improving students'reading comprehension ability is one of major achievements in English teaching. It's especially the case for senior high school learners, for the English study in the senior high school is not only the basis for the long English reading road, but also the foundation for their future academic and occupational success.However, since reading is an inside mental act, a very complex psychological and cognitive process, it's very difficult for others to know readers'inside process of thinking, so although students have devoted a lot of time and efforts to it, the result is still unsatisfactory. All of these have brought much challenge to English teachers in senior high school.For many years, grammar-translation oriented teaching method has dominated the reading pedagogy. With the development of teaching theory and practice, many problems of this method appear. Thus people are constantly exploring new ways of teaching reading. Since the 1970s with the development of learning strategy research, more and more attention has been drawn to the strategy training, but some doubt has been raised to the effectiveness and appropriateness of it. Then what method on earth should teachers use to improve students'reading ability? Thus the empirical studies in this field are urgent and necessary.So this study intends to make up for this deficiency in which the author used reading strategies and strategy training as the theoretical foundation, through the empirical study to compare the effects of these two teaching methods on students'reading proficiency, to prove the effectiveness of reading strategy training in senior high school. It aims to find out the answers to the following research questions: 1) Can the strategy training improve students'reading comprehension proficiency? 2) What effects does the strategy training have on students'reading strategy use? 3) What is students'attitude towards reading and reading strategy training?The strategies selected for training cover the three branches of reading strategies: meta-cognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies, comprehensive as well as detailed, making up for the deficiency of the previous study just choosing one kind of strategy to train; in addition, this thesis paper also provides a set of detailed reading strategy training approaches.Quantitative and qualitative analyses are combined together in this study to examine the effects of strategy training on students'reading comprehension proficiency. The participants were 100 students in senior Grade One from Middle School Affiliated to Harbin Institute of Technology in Heilongjiang Province. Among them, 50 students (Class 2), taught by the author, comprised the experimental group. The other 50 students (Class 3), taught by another teacher, my colleague, served as the control group. The experimental class received explicit reading strategy training lasted for ten weeks, while the comparison group followed the traditional teaching method and received no strategy training; they just participated the reading comprehension tests before and after the training and filled in the reading comprehension questionnaire after the training. The data of the two tests and the survey of questionnaire were analyzed by SPSS11.5, the results of which are shown as follows:1. Reading strategy training has positive effects on students'overall reading comprehension proficiency.2. Students receiving training have changed a lot in their strategy use; the frequency of their strategy use has improved obviously, which proved the effectiveness of the training on students in their strategy use.3. Students take positive attitude towards the training; their attitude towards reading has also changed significantly; their reading motivation and interests also accordingly improved.All the experiment results show that reading strategy training has positive effects on senior high school students in reading, thus proving the effectiveness of reading strategy training, which offers a reference to teachers as to how to teach reading in the future.