Task-difficulty-Based Study On Reading Strategy Used By Non-English Majors

Reading plays a decisive role in China’s foreign language education as it is not only oneof the four basic skills in English learning, but a vital way for students to acquire informationin second language learning environment. With the proposal of “student-centered” point ofview in the area of second language acquisition, researchers focus their eyes on how toimprove learners’ self-learning ability. As a result, the importance of doing research onstudents’ learning strategies comes to front. Reading strategy is a micro perspective oflearning strategies. Although some achievements in reading strategies have been made inChina (Wen Qiufang,2004), the research on investigating reading strategies by distinguishingdifficulty of reading task is rare.As a starting point, this paper proceeds to investigating the use of reading strategies bythe way of distinguishing difficulty of reading task. A quantitative research is employed. Itaims to observe whether there are any differences in strategy use by non-English majors in notask and task reading. Besides, the preferences and characteristics of reading strategy usebetween graduates and undergraduates can be found. Based on learners’ weaknesses andinsufficient use of reading strategies, some important implications and suggestions can beprovided to college English teaching. The following four questions can be addressed:1) What is the overall reading strategy use by non-English majors in no task, easy taskand difficult task?2) What are the differences in strategy use by graduates and undergraduates in no task?3) What are the differences in strategy use by graduates and undergraduates in easy task?4) What are the differences in strategy use by graduates and undergraduates in difficulttask?A revised reading strategies’ questionnaire based on Strategy Inventory for LanguageLearning (SILL) of Oxford (2004) was adopted.227non-English majors participated in thisresearch and three reading strategies’ questionnaires had been completed. Statistical Packagefor the Social Sciences (SPSS17.0) was used to analyze the data. Procedures as descriptive statistics and independent samples t-test were used in the study.The findings of this research are listed as follows:1. In no task, the most frequently used reading strategies are cognitive strategiesfollowed by metacognitive strategies and rehearsal strategies, while in easy task and difficulttask, metacoginitive strategies are used more frequently than cognitive and rehearsalstrategies. What’s more, with the increase of reading difficulty, the use frequency of cognitivestrategies decreases gradually.2. Through independent samples t-test, there are7items that have shown significantdifferences in strategy use by graduates and undergraduates in no task. They are predicting,inference, guessing words and structure analyses in cognitive strategies, out of whichtop-down strategies, bottom-up strategies and interactive strategies are used more often bygraduates than by undergraduates.3. In easy task,7items of reading strategies have shown their significant differences. Thetypes of reading strategy adopted by graduates in easy task are not more than that in no task.While, undergraduates prefer to use monitoring strategy and guessing words strategy.4. In difficult task,9items of reading strategies have shown their significant differences.According to the data, the use frequency and the types of reading strategies adopted bygraduates are higher and more than that by undergraduates. Graduates are good at choosingproper reading strategies in dealing with different reading task, while undergraduates prefer toadopt monitoring and guessing words strategies whenever in easy task and in difficulty task.Based on these findings, some implications and suggestions on reading strategy havebeen discussed and provided.