A Research On English Reading Strategy Training In Junior High School Classrooms

Research on reading strategy is based on the idea that success in reading mainly depends on appropriate strategy use and learners, especially the unsuccessful ones, can improve their reading by being trained to use effective strategies so that they can consciously take more responsibility of their own reading process and contribute to autonomy. Positive effects of strategy training in the fields of L1 and L2 reading have been claimed, whereas in China there have been relatively few studies to investigate the training effects on students'reading ability and they were almost conducted in University classrooms. However this study were conducted in the Chinese EFL junior high school classroom context to examine if the reading strategy training has an effect on reading interest and ability.In the study,88 third-year students in two intact classes at Maba Junior High School in Xuyi County were either participants in the explicit reading strategy training that incorporated into the regular English instruction or were comparison students receiving the traditional way of teaching in the one-term period. Both the experimental and the comparison groups were pre-and post-tested. The experimental group also filled out a post-training questionnaire about their attitudes toward the usefulness of the strategies, and the effect on reading interest. After the training, data from the pre-and posttests, and the student questionnaire were collected and computed, and then analyzed by means of SPSS11.0.The main findings are as follows:1. It appears that the explicit training of reading strategies in the Chinese EFL junior high school classroom is successful in improving students'overall reading comprehension proficiency as confirmed by the significant differences between the training and non-strategy training conditions.2. The training methods utilized in this study have unequal influence on students' performance on different types of reading comprehension questions in the reading proficiency pre-and posttests. It appears that the students'abilities of grasping main ideas, making global and lexical inferences from both given passages and knowledge of the world are significantly enhanced, whereas their ability to locate specific information seems to be impervious to the training. 3. As for the students'reading fluency, the statistically significant increase of reading rate in the experimental group as compared with the non-strategy training group manifests the strong effects of the strategies trained in this study in helping students develop reading fluency.4. The post-training questionnaire reveals that the students take positive attitudes toward the training and become interested in reading.The results of this study suggest that foreign language reading pedagogy would benefit from the incorporation of explicit strategy training. Further, language teachers should reorient their roles in developing strategic and independent learners.