A Comparative Study Of Application And Teaching Of Reading Strategies In Shanghai's Two Model Senior High Schools

Reading is an important approach to information and also a means for people to communicate with each other.In the context of increasing globalization,effective English reading plays an extremely important role in people's survival and development.Reading strategy teaching is one of the most important parts of the reading teaching .Its purpose is, by means of teaching reading strategies, to develop and improve students'abilities to access information from English language articles, thus laying a foundation for their lifetime learning. But, to our disappointment, in our current reading teaching, for teachers'lack of the knowledge and awarenesses of reading strategies, teachers generally fail to guide and train students'reading strategies, resulting in the students'reading abilities not being properly raised .By means of documental research, two written questionnaires and SPSS17.0, the present study ,taking as subjects part of Senior Two stduents and English teachers in Shanghai Nanhui Senior High School and Shanghai Xiangming Senior High School ,is to investigate and explore reading strategies employed by the two schools'students and the reading strategy teaching conducted by the two schools'teachers. Through the investigation, the author has found that although the students in these two schools have employed various reading strategies in their reading process, the overall use levels are not quite high and need to be improved. Meanwhile, the author also finds that the students in Xiangming Senior High School are better than those in Shanghai Nanhui Senior High School in the employment of the three main reading strategies and that good-students in two schools are better than intermediate and poor-students in all the aspects of reading strategy employment.These findings support the view that the application frequency of reading strategies significally correlate with students'English achievements.Through the comparison of two schools'reading strategy teaching, the auther discovers that teachers in both schools ,especially teachers in Shanghai Nanhui Senior High School, are badly in need of the knowledge of reading and reading strategies, and that they neglect the training of metacognitive reading strategy. Teachers in both schools lack the training and evaluation in out-of-class reading. Based on the above findings of the study, the author offers some suggestions on reading strategy teaching:(1)English teachers should be strengthened in reading knowledge and reading strategies;(2)teachers should change the teaching ideas and foster a correct view of reading teaching;(3)teachers should correctly handle the "instruction" and "practice";(4)teachers should not only strengthen reading strategy guidance in class, but also enhance the reading guidance and evaluation out of class; (5)more attention should go to intermediate students in reading strategy training; (6)teachers should enhance the cultivation of students'reading strategies, especially the metacognitive reading strategies.Through the experiment, the auther finds that the frequency of reading metacognitive strategies and students'reading comprehension can be improved by cultivaing metacognitive reading strategies.