A Study On English Reading Strategies Used By Senior High School Students

Reading plays a significant role in students’ English learning. Therefore, it drawsmuch attention in the teaching and learning process. Over the years the collegeentrance examination has attached great importance to the reading ability of students.However, the statistics of the students’ scoring in the reading comprehension partshows the scoring average is not satisfying. So it becomes an important researchsubject for the English teachers to improve students’ reading ability. English readingstrategies play a key role in reading. Reading strategy is prominent among the variousfactors affecting the result whether learners can enhance their second languagecompetence and communicative competence. The main purpose of this paper is toexplore the situations in which the reading strategies are used by senior schoolstudents.The students from three different schools in Wenzhou participate in thisinvestigation whose purpose is to find out the overall situations of the strategy use andwhat the differences are in strategy use between high-score and low-score students.The investigation result is to be analyzed by the statistical software SPSS18.0. At thesame time, the students who have participated in the questionnaire survey also takepart in the application of reading strategies ability test.30samples from respectivelyhigh achievers and low-score group are drawn out and the error rate is analyzed.There are also10students interviewed. Finally the investigation is summarized andsome proposals are put forward in order to provide some references to the teaching ofEnglish reading.The main conclusions of the investigation are as follows. First, the majority ofstudents learning English are for the purpose of passing exams or finding good jobs.Second, the overall frequency of the reading strategies used by the senior students isnot very high. Third, the reading habits of the students are to be corrected. Fourth,higher achievers can have a better command of the strategies than the low-scorestudents, such as contextualization, resourcing, summarizing, transfer, self-monitoringand arranging&planning. Finally, students’ ability to put the reading strategies intouse is generally not great.The teaching suggestions are put forward at the end of this paper.