English Reading Strategy Training In Senior 3

Most of the senior 3 students in the present writer's classes had a hard time in English studies. With respect to English reading abilities, many struggling students had difficulty recognizing words in the context. Some could recognize words, but were not able to comprehend what they read. Some could get a rough idea of what they read, but lacked strategies to help them interpret what they read. Only a few better students had acquired some simple reading skills or strategies but still considered reading comprehension a headache.In order to find a breakthrough point, the writer decided to conduct a reading strategy training program. There were 36 students in the two intact classes, with 25 in the stronger class and 11 in the weaker class. The program lasted for 4 months, 16 weeks altogether. The training was conducted by means of teacher modeling by think-aloud, scaffolding, cooperative learning, etc. Considering the fact that the strategies adopted in the training mainly belong to cognitive or processing ones, some management tools, such as rubrics, tally sheets and reading logs, were designed and put into use in the classroom according to different conditions and different stages.Some changes were made to common reading strategy experiments conducted in China. First, the scope of reading ability was extended to cloze and reading comprehension (as in the NMET), with the two parts treated as a closely-related whole. Second, an independent third group was introduced to determine the difficulty coefficient between the pretest and the posttest, and then respective increase rates were calculated and a very clear conclusion was drawn that reading strategy training is effective, for both the better students and the less successful students, and that it is more efficient than traditional reading teaching methods. Besides, the training effects were examined from the perspective of students' impressions and behavior moods by means of questionnaires and classroom observations. This training program is a tentative attempt; much is still to be desired in many aspects such as training design and implementation, especially a relatively small sample and the means of collecting and processing of data. A most obvious limitation of the research is that it can not answer the question whether it can offer long-term benefits.