Empirical Study On Reading Strategies Training Of Less Successful Senior One EFL Learners

Reading is one of the most important skills in EFL learning,especially in dealing with the College Entrance Examination Papers, for a long time in English teaching the middle school students are required to recite and master a large vocabulary, and spend a great deal of time doing reading exercises,but eventually the students are puzzled with their reading skills. Hence it seems urgent for us to improve students'English reading ability. The traditional grammar-translation method is not fit for contemperory high school English teaching any longer, especially it doesn't work especially in improving students'reading ability and cultivating their ability of self-autonomous learning. Therefore we have to do research in reading strateges to improve students'reading ability, not only can bringing cognitive and meta-cognitive reading strategy training into English teaching make students read self-autonomously and effectively but finally improve students'comprehensive reading proficiency.Doing research in reading strategies and holding a reading strategies training need some theories support, thus our research would be more effective and reliable. In my study, Information Processing Theory, Cognition Theory and Metacognitive Theory are applied in order to help us understand the nature of reading deeply. These theories not only contain a general meaningful information processing from cognition such as sense, memory, storing, information extraction and output, but also contain deeper meaningful meta-cognitive activities, such as planning, monitoring, management, adjusting and evaluation.When students are in senior school, they are easily frustrated by English reading comprehension and some students lost their interest in learning English. If English reading strategies are instructed to the students, they can be encouraged to read more actively in English, study English more successfully and get a better performance in NMET.The student group of this research comes from two classes of Grade one of No. 12th High School in JiLin City, the number of which totals 116. Based on the statistics from Secondary Education Admission Office of JiLin city in the year of 2009, in High school entrance examination of JiLin city, the number of students whose score is over 580 is about 1980 among the total number of 9980, the number of students whose score is over 550 is about 3991, meanwhile among the other 5989 students 90% of them have a score between 550 and 510. In Jilin city the students'scores over 580 are mostly admitted into JiLin City No. One High School, YuWen High School and No. One High School of JiLin Petroleum Chemical Corporation. While in my school, No12 middle school in JiLin city, the scores of students who are admitted into our shcool are between 580 to 510. The students in our shcool are divided into three levels, that is, top class, experimental class, ordinary class. The students'scores of entrance examination are lower than 550, thus these students in my classes belong to ordinary class, the reading pretest held after they are admitted to our school shows the students of senior one class one and two are less successful learners. I actualized an English reading strategy training for four months and analyzed the result.The purpose is to find out whether the frequency of reading strategies use varies in pretest and post-test, whether Reading Strategy Training can enhance students' reading performance and how is the Correlation between reading strategies and reading proficiency.Before and after training two English proficiency tests and two questionnaires of reading strategies are separately carried out. The training process is as follows: In the first stage, reading nature and reading strategies are instructed. In the second stage, I use"think-aloud"to give examples, analyse, explain and demonstrates how to use related reading strategies in reading. In the third stage the teacher instructs students to use those reading strategies. Some activities can be arranged in class, for example, the group discussion, in which students are encouraged to demonstrate the mode of thinking and the course of using reading strategies to others for improving their strategic reading ability. In the fourth stage, I use SPSS16.0 and DPS 9.50 to collect, arrange and analyze the data to validate and explain the result of the quantitative study.The training result shows that there is some correlation between the strategy use and the reading proficiency for senior one students, for example, summarization as well as inferring etc. have a close relative with students reading level; successful readers and less successful readers have significant differences in using strategies, successful readers not only can use strategies more often, but also can use them consciously and effectively; as to the students of the control class, some cognitive strategies, such as summarization, inferring, skimming are used frequently, while texture analysis strategy, meta-cognitive strategies, social and affective strategies are used less frequently; the correlation between reading strategies and English reading proficiency indicates that the improvement of the reading performance is affected by cognitive, meta-cognitive and social affective strategies. In the process of training, if we control the affective factors, we can achieve ideal effects by the training of cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies.My study may have some implications for EFL teaching in senior middle schools. That is, before teaching, teachers should know about their students'reading proficiency, and accordingly decide on teaching importance and design their teaching plans. During the course of teaching, teachers arrange reading strategies instruction and training properly enabling them to master related strategies and read efficiently, meanwhile we develop students'reading interests and encourage them to get access to various reading resources so as to improve their reading proficiency.