A Comparative Study Of Gender Differences In Middle School Students' Reading Literacy

In recent years, the international academia and education circle pay close attention to the hot topic of education and gender. Our country also gradually realized the necessity to carry out different types of education for students of different gender. In education practice, education should give full play to its function which is inseparable from the attention to the existence of gender differences. Reading literacy is a basic skill and a dynamic concept, it changes with the development of social and cultural. The ability of using, understanding and reflection of all kinds of information by people can greatly affects the participation of the knowledge society in an all-round way. Reading literacy is important for middle school students’ academic performance. Students who possess a good reading literacy will be able to have advantages in many ways. In the reading assessment of PISA-2009, the reading scores of the boys generally lower than the girls’ among participating countries. Therefore, this research focusing on the different performance of students in reading from the perspective of gender differences analyzed and discussed the specific phenomenon.The purpose of this study is: To explore what kind of gender differences in reading literacy between the middle school students in China and the United States; To investigate the causes of gender differences; To propound localization strategy and opinions for the Chinese students’ reading literacy in gender difference through the comparison of China and the United States.This study constructing the hypothesis model of gender affecting reading literacy and using SPSS17.0 and AMOS17.0 statistical software analyzed the influence factors of students’ reading literacy. The analysis results showed that, the gender of the students in both China and the United States has an influence on the reading achievement, and all of the girls are higher than boys in reading scores. Reading participation, the use of metacognitive strategies and learning strategies will affect the students’ reading ability. Among them, reading metacognitive strategies and the favorite reading are the most influential to students’ reading literacy. Therefore, the following suggestions are put forward for the teaching of gender differences in middle school students. Establish a correct view of gender differences and integration of gender differences in the development of curriculum development and cultivate boys’ reading interest, and guide the male students to pay more attention to the reading of the extracurricular books.