Textbook-based Reading Strategies Training For Senior High School Students

In today’s learning society, reading as a basic learning skill is significant. According to the National English Curriculum Standards (2001:6), the overall objective of English course for basic education is to cultivate students’overall language ability, including language knowledge, language skills and learning strategies and so on. It is known to all that reading plays a significant part in the four language skills. However, the present situation is that many students have spent enormous time and energy in reading but achieved unequally effect (Cheng and Zheng,2002). Therefore, it is essential to develop senior high school students’reading strategies.As for the studies on learning strategies, it can be traced back to the1960s abroad and the1980s in China (Zeng,2008). Nowadays, more and more studies on training learners’strategies in our country keep springing up. On the other hand, the studies need improvement. After all, English is a foreign language in the context of China in which reading comprehension plays a great role. Attention should be paid to the core task of learning strategies. What is the same at home and abroad is to help learners grasp their own way of studying, to further form the ability of thinking by themselves, with critical thoughts and to learn happily. According to Wen Qiufang (2003), most of the studies and training concentrated on the college students. Few reading strategies training were conducted and so were the strategies training based on textbooks. Firstly, most of the strategy training took the form of lectures. Secondly, the subjects were often the college students. There were few strategies training which were based on the middle school textbooks.Therefore, the author worked with the teacher from Chongqing Sun Yat-Sen Foreign Language School and the teacher trained students there for eight weeks. The training was based on the textbook Senior English for Schools Students’Book1. The training aimed to help students learn how to set up their own plans of study, how to cooperate with the other students, how to extract useful information more effectively, how to make of the main idea, how to make use of one’s own background information and manage to get the unknown information by Oxford’s (2008) three classifications of reading strategies: cognitive, meta-cognitive and social/affective reading strategies. This thesis tries to answer two questions:1. Through the reading strategies training, can the use frequency of learners’reading strategies increase?2. How is the reading strategies training conducive for those trained learners in their reading ability?The author set up two classes as the experimental and the control class with almost the same level of English test scores and not significant different results of the pre-test questionnaires. By means of combining qualitative and quantitative approach, before and after the training, questionnaires were done by the students from the two classes. And ten students from the experimental class were randomly selected according to the sex ratio to carry out the interviews. The data and feedback were collected. Through the analysis and feedback from the questionnaires and interviews, the conclusion can be drawn. On the whole, the reading strategies training based on the textbook increased the frequencies of students’using the reading strategies and the training did make their reading more effective. For example, they tended to make use of skimming, scanning, taking notes, predicting before reading, using images and discussing with classmates more often. From the analysis of the questionnaires results, the increment of the experimental class was more than that of the control class. By the analysis of independent samples t test, the increment was significant and the change was remarkable in the aspect of cognitive reading strategies and social/affective reading strategies. The increase is not significant in the aspect of meta-cognitive reading strategies. On the condition that the baseline of each class is not significantly different, the conclusion can be made that the training effect is remarkable in the cognitive and social/affective reading strategies. In the interviews, the students in the experimental class paid more attention to summarizing the main idea of the text, or finding the passages’views according to the styles or structures. Meanwhile, the appropriate arrangement of the reading strategies could assist the teacher’s reading strategies training; the meta-cognitive reading strategies were more difficult to train, which perhaps was because these strategies involve the allocation of students’ extracurricular time, their self-management abilities, and the recurrent characteristic of the students’bad learning habits and so on; after training, the communication between the teacher and the students was less than that among students themselves. The weak points were that the limited training period and relatively few training samples might influence the effect of training.