Experimental Study Of The English Reading Strategy Training On The Junior High School Students

Mc Donough (1995) classified the studies regarding learning strategies into two categories: descriptive studies and interventionist studies. Descriptive studies focus mainly on the more theoretical aspect of the study, such as the identification, definition and classification of learning strategies while interventionist studies are more interested in the implementation and application of the research findings from the theoretical studies to the classroom practice, either to test the validity and feasibility of the research findings, or to improve the efficiency of language learning. Briefly speaking, interventionist studies focus on strategies training.In China, most learning strategies training projects have college students and adults as their research subjects and studies focusing on middle school students are very few, if there are any. And this gives the rationale for the present study.This research was based on the schema theory. The researcher designed integration training mode in reading teaching. The author of this thesis intends to discover the effect of reading strategies training on Grade 8 students' reading comprehension, other aspects of language learning, and their affect & attitude as well.First of all, with the help of some previous researches the present researcher conducted a survey on 416 students and semi-structured interviews on 8 teachers from Grade 8 in Shanghai Shangde Experimental School, in an attempt to find answers to the following two questions: Do the students often use reading strategies while reading in English? Do the teachers have strategy-awareness and integrate the training of reading strategies into their teaching of reading?Based on the pioneer study, an experiment program was carefully designed. Two groups of students were chosen for the purpose of the experiment, one as the experimental group and the other the controlled group. The experiment lasted over a period of five months and obtained findings as follows:1. The training of reading strategies seems to be feasible for the junior students because it proves to be effective in improving the students' reading comprehension.2. The training of reading strategies can improve students' writing ability.