A Study On Reading Strategies In Senior High School ESL Classroom

Foreign language learning is a very complicated process.A lot of individual differences that affect learners' achievements are involved,such as ages,language aptitude,motivation,learning style,learning strategies and personality.Researchers,especially language teachers generally think that language learning strategies are of vital importance to the outcome of foreign language learning. As the key part of language learning,reading learning strategies attract the attention of scholars,language teachers and students increasingly and become a focus in the field of English learning and teaching.As to the high school students,the reading learning strategies are more important in their reading class.Reading strategies refer to strategies(such as inference, deduction,concentration on reading and other strategies) used by language learners aiming to improve their reading comprehension. Hence research on reading strategies is of great importance in language learning as well as in language teaching.Reading ability refers to the reading skills that a reader brings to the text.These skills include a reader's ability to monitor their own comprehension, decode unknown words and apply fix-up strategies.So the study on the use of reading strategies by senior high school students and how to foster the learning ability based on them are of great significance.In order to understand better the current situation of students reading learning beliefs and reading learning strategies in the author's high school.The study intends to investigate,from cognitive perspective,the reading strategies employed by the ordinary senior high school students(from Panshan Senior High School,Liaoning Province) using a small-scale questionnaire of learning strategies.The thesis wants to answer the following research questions: 1.How is the situation of reading strategies employed by the ordinary senior high school students?2.What's the relationship between the reading strategies and the students' reading comprehension achievements?3.How do good and poor Chinese EFL learners differ in their reading strategy use?4.How can we employ the reading strategies to foster the learners' reading ability?The results show that high school students use a small number of reading strategies.Good language learners do employ more strategies while they are learning English.Moreover,good language learners make use of these strategies more frequently and flexibly than poor language learners.There exists obvious divergence leading to the different results of the reading comprehension achievements in second language.That is,they are in the direct proportion.Based on the results of the research,the thesis suggests some specific ways to improve the students' reading ability.