Towards The Impacts Of Reading Strategy Instruction Upon English Students' Reading Proficiency

Since 1970's, studies in SLA language have shifted the focus from "how to teach" to "how to learn", learning strategies-based study became popular in SLA field. It started to integrate with teaching practice in 1990's. Considerable interest has been shown in studies in reading strategy and its subcategory in the last two decades in China.As a micro-proposition in learning strategies, there are rare outputs on reading strategies or reading strategy training compared with more research results on listening strategies and vocabulary acquisition strategies. The previous research mainly involved in the declarative and contrastive perspective research, such as: strategies used by successful and non-successful learners, English majors and non-English majors, reading strategies training is teachable. The research on the efficiency and feasibility of reading strategies is under-researched.According to the principle:Reading strategies can be gained through training. Author makes the overall research drawing on the theoretical frame on Anderson's ACT Model, and Chamot and O'Mally's five-step instructional model for strategy training to investigate the frequency of current reading strategies use in a total of 60 subjects of English major freshmen in Guangdong Peizheng College. An empirical research on reading strategy training is conducted between Experimental Class, and Control Class to verify the efficiency of reading strategies instruction in reading teacher.After three stages reading strategies instruction, the efficiency was evaluated by data collection and analysis to an English proficiency post-test,1 post-test questionnaire, and interviews. The study revealed three main findings:1. The students in EC, who are systematically trained in learning and applying the reading strategies, made more progress in reading proficiency than students in Control Class.2. Cognitive strategies were largely used by both EC and CC before training, while meta-cognitive strategies were used more frequently by students in Experimental Class after training.3. The strategies awareness was greatly enhanced in EC; the effect of strategy-based instruction was more positive on the high level students.The findings of the study showed English learners can benefit from strategies training. some pedagogical implications are suggested to improve the efficiency of English reading teaching:1. Developing the students' strategic awareness is useful for promoting success in English study.2.The design of the training project as well as the strategies that are selected for training should be based on students'learning situations and needs.3. when conducting strategy training, teacher should take some more issues into consideration..