A Study Of The Application Of Cognitive Strategies In College Non-english Majors’ Reading Comprehension

Reading is a very important language skill for English learners, how to improvethe students’ reading ability is a major concern for researchers. For several decades,cognitive strategies have aroused many researchers’ interest and how to applycognitive strategies to reading also becomes a focus. However, many collegenon-English majors feel that their reading proficiency is far from satisfying thoughthey have studied English for more than ten years. Besides, more and more studentswant to pass the CET-4examination, in CET-4，reading takes a percentage of35%.Therefore, how to improve the student’s reading ability is a necessary part for collegeteachers. The current situation of using reading strategies among non-English majorsis studied in this paper. The research aims to study the relationship between the use ofstrategies-based instruction (SBI) and the students’ reading achievements. The readingcomprehension part of previous CET test and a questionnaire are adopted in this studyto collect data from the investigated students. The author is a teacher of LiaoNingTechnical University and the author selected two classes as the control class (C.C) andthe experimental class (E.C), the two class students are both non-English majors andshare the same English level. The major findings of this study are: non-English majorstudents use reading strategies in medium level when doing reading comprehensiontests. Cognitive reading strategies significantly correlate with reading achievementsand play an important role in reading comprehension. There are differences in theapplication of reading strategies between high-proficiency readers and low-proficiency readers. Teachers do not pay high attention to instructing readingstrategies in the classroom, so some pedagogical implications on the teaching ofreading strategies are suggested.This paper is designed to explore both the role and the meaning of the cognitivestrategies in the teaching of college non-English majors reading. After experiment anddata analysis, the author comes to a result that the strategy-based instruction has somepositive influence on the non-English majors’ reading abilities and proficiency.