A Study On English Reading Strategies Of High School Students

Reading is an extremely valuable skill to foreign language learners. Reading hasbeen the focus of the language instructor both in theory and in practice. In the highschools, the teaching of reading is laid great emphasis on, but little progress has beenmade. The present study attempts to explore how high school students employ strategiesin their reading.The study of English reading strategies is based on learning strategies as reading isboth a means of learning and the purpose of learning with its own characteristics. In theview of second language learning strategies and O’Malley and Chamot’s (1990)classification of levels of learning strategies, this research is focused on the actualsituation of high school students’ reading strategies through the methods of thequestionnaire and the interview, and aims to answer the following three questions:1. What are the frequencies of the use of English reading strategies by the high schoolstudents?2. What are the differences between high proficiency students and low proficiencystudents in the use of reading strategies?3. What is the correlation between the use of reading strategies and readingproficiency?This research chose12010th-year students as participants from Number1HighSchool of ShiYan city in Hubei province. They answered the questionnaire and some ofthem were interviewed. Based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis, the resultsshowed that the frequency of the use of reading strategies in high school are not high,the use of cognitive strategies is much higher than meta-cognitive and affective/socialstrategies; there is a sharp contrast of the strategy usage condition between highproficiency group and low proficiency group, which demonstrates that the former arebetter than the latter in the use of cognitive strategies, meta-cognitive strategies, whilethere is no clear difference in using affective/social strategies; and the usage of readingstrategies has a positive correlation with scores.Finally, the thesis, based on the results of the research, put forward somesuggestions for teaching English reading in high schools.