A Study On The Students' Reading Strategies In High Middle Schools

This thesis mainly reported a study of reading strategy training in an ongoing senior English classroom, which aims at examining the points of reading comprehension in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET), with the purposes of improving senior students' ability to read and the skills of taking an examination and then the thesis investigated the effects of the training on Chinese senior students' reading ability by means of analyzing test results and the questionnaire and student interview by employing the quantitative approach and qualitative approach. The results showed that reading strategy training was effective in enhancing senior students' overall English reading proficiency and reading rate. The intervention had significant effect on the improvement of the students' abilities to grasp main ideas and to make global and lexical inferences from both given passages and knowledge of the world; however, it had no obvious effect on the improvement of their ability to extract detailed information from the texts. The post-training questionnaire and student interview finally revealed that the students took positive attitudes toward the training and the four strategies, which indicates that such training activities are relatively safe to use in Chinese senior English reading classrooms. This thesis consists of five parts:Chapter one talks about the background and the purpose of this study.It gives a historical review of the reading strategies studied by researchers and the classification of language learning strategies.Chapter two is review of related studies, mainly introducing Schema Theory, Meta-cognitive Strategies and related studies conducted in China and Abroad. In the end the author points out the problems in the previous research and the significance of the present study.Chapter three focuses on the present study. In this part, the author introduces the study methods, the selection of subjects, the data collecting system, and the study procedure of the data collection and analysis. A pre-test, a post-test, two questionnaires and an interview were conducted in both the experimental class and the control class. The strategy training includes three steps, and lasts fifteen weeks.Chapter four analyses the data and shows the results of the experiment, and results of the studyChapter five is the conclusion, which gives some suggestions for the pedagogy and the future research in this field.