A Study Of The Applications Of English Reading Strategies In Junior High School

With the social development characterized by modernization and globalization,the sharing of knowledge and information becomes particularly important. It goeswithout saying that reading is important as a basic language skill as well as a mediumof communication. Therefore, in English teaching, the training of students Englishreading ability should keep pace with the times. However, the teaching of Englishreading continues to perplex most teachers of English in middle schools who realizethe importance of reading but lacks approaches to and techniques of effectiveteaching of reading.In this thesis, the author attempts to explain the second language learningstrategies in the context of her own teaching and research, namely the metacognitivestrategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies. An effort has beenmade to analyze the concept of English reading, inspired by K.S.Goodman’s idea ofreading as a psycholinguistic guessing game. The author expounds three processingmodes in English reading i.e. the bottom-up model, the top-down model, and theinteractive model as well as the schema theory. Thus, in classroom teaching, theteachers are expected to arouse students’ awareness of the schemas available andencourage their conscious application of the schemas to improving their readingcomprehension. The definition and classification of English reading strategies are alsointerpreted and described by the author as behaviors to overcome the difficulties inreading, including prediction, ratiocination, guessing, skimming and scanning, toname the basic ones. The above lays a theoretical foundation for the discussion ofresearch findings presented in this paper.Based on the learning situation of junior middle school students, the authorchooses four reading strategies for junior middle school students as the key issues ofthis study. She also tries to integrate the training for reading strategies into dailyEnglish teaching supported by auxiliary practice. Follow-up exercises and practice arealso recommended to get students familiar with the reading strategies to the extentthat, ultimately, students are able to choose and use the right strategies for independent and successful reading.An experiment is carried out with ninety candidates, Year Nine junior middleschool students from Xiyuan Middle School, Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province. Afterfive-month training with ideas from the research, improvement of students’ abilitiesof English reading can be observed; they become more confident in the reading class,and seem more interested in English reading. If such systematic training continues,the teaching of reading can be improved with less polarization in English languageteaching.In conclusion, the results of the present study may suggest that the training ofstudents’ ability of using strategies for effective reading is important, practical anduseful in junior middle schools. The significance also lies in that such helpful changesin instructional approaches and strategies may give students an opportunity toachieve more learning autonomy, enjoy learning English and experience moresatisfaction and success instead of frustration and failure.