Action Research On Reading Strategy Training To Enhance Non-English Major Students’ English Reading Proifciency

Reading proficiency is an important part of English language proficiency.However, according to the statistics for College Entrance Exams, students got anunsatisfactory score for reading. In recent years, strategic research suggests thatappropriate strategy use is crucial in developing proficient learners. Researchersbelieve that students can improve their reading performance by being trained to useeffective strategies.This research aims at investigating the impact of reading strategy training onstudents’ awareness of strategy use and their reading proficiency.Based on reading strategies and schema theory, the author selected certainstrategies: scanning, skimming, prediction, structure analysis and word-guessing asthe primary task of reading strategy training, and explored answers to two researchquestions:(1) Can reading strategy training effectively enhance first-year non-Englishmajors’ reading strategy awareness?(2) Can reading strategy training effectivelyimprove first-year non-English majors’ reading proficiency?The participants of the action research were50non-English major students ofgrade one in Maoming Vocational and Technical College. The duration of the actionstudy is a cyclic procedure of fifteen weeks including "finding out the problem-making a plan-intervention-reflection", two weeks for preparation, twelveweeks for learning strategy training and one week for conclusion.Three instruments were used to measure the effectiveness of reading strategytraining. A questionnaire was conducted before the reading strategy training to findout the information of students’ strategic knowledge and strategy use. Two readingtests are taken from Practical English Test for College Students (Level B), which weretaken as the pre-and post-tests to find out if reading strategy training can improvestudents’ reading proficiency. To gather detailed information on how such readingstrategy training affects students’ awareness of strategies employment, three studentswere chosen to introspect what strategies they used during their reading processimmediately after a reading task. Both quantitative study and qualitative data had been collected to arrive at resultsfor the research. The statistical analysis process (SPSS) was used to analyze thequantitative data of the questionnaires and scores on reading tests. Descriptive analysiswas used to identify the general use frequency of reading strategies before and afterexperiment. And a comparison of the above data was employed to detect the differencesbefore and after experiment and to identify if the training of reading strategies canimprove students’ reading proficiency. The qualitative data from students’ introspectionwere summed up, sorted out and carefully examined by the author. A comparison of thedata was employed to detect the changes of reading strategy use before and after theexperiment.The findings of the study show that the reading strategy training can raise thestudents’ awareness of strategy employment and enhance their strategic use. Also, thestudents’ overall reading comprehension proficiency can be significantly improvedafter being trained. In the training process, the teacher should do reflection in time toimprove intervening actions, which is a crucial step for the following training project.The study has some significant pedagogical implications for reading strategy trainingon college learners.