A Study Of Reading Strategies Instruction On English Reading In Nursing School

For foreign language learners, reading is the most important way of language input.Reading teaching occupies a very important position in English teaching. In five-year nursingcollege, the time of English courses is very limited compared with its considerable teachingcontents and large volume of information, which usually leads to students’ slow speed, lowefficiency and poor performance in English learning. Therefore, in reading teaching, how toeffectively improve the students’ reading proficiency is always a problem to be solved.However, the results of the reading teaching are not so satisfactory. In China, many teachersstill adopted the traditional teaching methods, which ignore the cultivation of students’reading ability, fail to stimulate students’ interests in learning English and are not helpful forthe formation and development of students’ language skills. Reading strategy is used by thelearners to solve the problems in reading, and is an important part of learning strategy. It notonly includes some reading skills, but also the selective and controllable behaviors in order toachieve the expected purpose of reading. So the exploration of the students’ reading strategiesis particularly necessary. The use of reading strategies can help the readers to effectivelyimprove the speed, enhance the ability in the reading process.At present, the existing studies in domestic and foreign countries mainly focus onliterature review and descriptive studies. It is less related to an empirical study of strategytraining and its effect. Besides, these researches are mostly concerned with the students incollege and university as the participants and few researches have been done on readingstrategies instruction in five-year nursing schools in China. Therefore, this paper tries tocompare two classes of students from English nursing majors, intending to testify whether itis useful and effective to improve students’ reading ability by providing them with readingstrategies. It is also hoped to prove the teaching mode to have a positive effect in an ongoingcollege English classroom in China where English is taught as a foreign language. The presentexperimental study mainly involves the following three purposes:1.To identify the range ofreading strategies used by the students on reading tasks;2.To determine if reading strategytraining have impact on the students’ reading proficiency;3.To explore whether thestrategy-based instruction can improve students’ reading comprehension achievement. Reading strategies training refers to activities in which readers make effective use ofreading strategies to cope with reading materials in a foreign language under the instruction ofa teacher. It is carried out at the beginning of the term, lasting14weeks and including3stages.The explicit training mode is combined with the materials of textbook, making use of theperiod of time during which the teacher processes the texts and exercises. At the first stage,the teacher explains and demonstrates the strategies. The second, the students strengthen andpractice the strategies use under the guidance of teacher. The third, the students independentlytry to apply the strategies in reading. Reading strategy training plays an essential role incollege English teaching, as it help readers to improve their reading comprehension ability soas to achieve reading targets. Besides, it is also valuable to discover the most appropriate wayof reading to oneself and enhance the ability of independent learning, thus makingpreparations for lasting studies. This thesis mainly consists of five parts:Chapter One is the introduction. It introduces the origin, motivation and the overallstructure of this study.Chapter Two is literature review. It reviews some relevant knowledge about learningstrategies and reading strategies, including the definitions, characteristics and classifications.It also gives a very short description about some researches of reading strategy training inChina and abroad. In the end, the author points out the theoretical framework of the presentstudy.Chapter Three is the research methodology. It describes the study methods, the selectionof subjects, the data collection and the study procedure. To secure the reliability of the results,both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed in this study. First, the quantitativedata are collected from a questionnaire answered by80students from five-year Englishnursing majors in Chengde Nusing Vocational College. Class0901is chosen for theexperimental class, accepting the reading strategy training for14weeks, while Class0902forthe control class, still following the traditional teaching model. The reading course isundertaken by the same teacher, with the same teaching outline, materials and schedule. Thisstage concentrates on the situation of reading strategy use and the impact of reading strategytraining on the reading process. The second stage is mainly based on qualitative research, atwhich10students are selected for an interview in order to further verify and explain the results of quantitative analysis. This stage focuses on the effects of reading strategy trainingon reading and English achievement.Chapter Four is the results and discussion. It shows the results of the study and theanalyses of the results through reading proficiency tests (pretest and posttest). All eightreading comprehension passages are selected from CET-4tests in June and December,2012.Analysis of data and the statistics of questionnaire provide the answers to research questions.At the same time, they also reveal the students’ percentage of acceptance and approval of theapproach, thus detecting the feasibility and effectiveness of reading strategy training.Chapter Five is the conclusion. It presents the major findings of this study. The authorfinally claims that compared with the traditional approach, the strategy reading instruction ismore effective to facilitate the students’ reading proficiency. Reading strategies, especially thecognitive strategies and meta-cognitive strategies have a positive effect on English reading.Besides, this chapter also indicates some limitations of the study and gives some suggestionsfor the future research in this field.This thesis aims to make a comprehensive evaluation about our college students’ readingstrategy use and reading proficiency, and to provide valuable and practical advice for thereading teaching of English teachers. Before teaching reading, teachers should fullyunderstand the students’ real reading levels. On this basis, they make clear the focus ofreading instruction and accordingly design their teaching plans. During the course of readingstrategies, teachers need to make reasonable arrangements about explanation and training, sothat students master various reading strategies, make more efficient use of these strategies andimprove the reading ability.