The Effects Of Students' Reading Proficiency And Academic Major On Their Use Of Reading Strategies In The Chinese Context

In this modern age of multimedia and high-tech environment, most of us still rely on our reading ability to gain information for our work and life. Although a considerable amount of research explored the effect of readers'motivation, language proficiency level on their reading strategies using, there is few studies that reveal the correlation between learners'academic major and their use of reading strategies in the Chinese context. Therefore, it is deemed necessary to conduct a study that could explore the effect of students'reading proficiency and academic major on their use of reading strategies in the Chinese university.This study aims at examining the general tendency and specific types of reading strategies used by non-English majors in a Chinese university. It attempts to find out differences of English reading strategy use between good and poor learners. It also looks at how students'academic major may influence their use of reading strategies. The subjects were 187 non-English major students aged 19 to 21 from Jiangxi University of Science and Technology. The students'use of reading strategies was measured by means of a 30-item questionnaire designed by Gail Taillefer and Tony Pugh (1998). SPSS version 17.0 was used to compute descriptive statistics, T-test, correlation analysis. Descriptive statistics were calculated to give an overall description of general tendency in reading strategies use. Independent sample t-test was used to determine whether there are any significant differences between high-achievement students and low-achievement students, and between science and social science college students. A correlation test was conducted to determine how reading strategies are related to the reading proficiency.Results of this study indicated that frequency of the whole reading strategy use of Chinese non-English major students is at the medium level. As regards to the differences in the use of reading strategies between high-proficiency and low-proficiency readers, high-proficiency readers use general reading strategies significantly more often than low-proficiency readers; social science college students use reading strategies more frequently than science college students. It is also found that there is a correlation between overall reading strategies as well as two types of reading strategies use and reading proficiency.This investigation can give some pedagogical implications for English teaching and learning. Reading strategy training must be conducted by English teachers in classrooms to help students become efficient and autonomous English readers. Before reading strategy training starts, teachers should make themselves familiar with the development of research on language learning strategies and reading strategies, and then they can be aware of the importance of strategy use. During reading strategy training, teacher should teach students to use some effective general strategies on textual content and guide them to react to information in the text with the help of their background knowledge. At last teachers should find out individual differences that college majors displayed in English reading, giving instructions and demonstration on how to use different reading strategies to perform a reading task instead of selecting reading strategies for students.