A Study Of Improving Senior Middle School Students’ Reading Competence Through Reading Strategy Training

the development of China’s economic and the policy of opening-up to the outside world, we can find that the people now are living in an age of international co-operation and China needs to know more about the world and the world needs to know more about China. It is vitally important to cultivate a group of highly educated young people with foreign language skills so that China can play a more important role on the world stage. As language learners, we all know that reading occupies an important position in communication. Reading is an important way of getting information and learning about the outside world. Besides, according to the English syllabus and curriculum for senior middle school, it is required that the students’ reading competence should be improved to keep up with the development of the society. Reading also plays a very important role in the middle school and college entrance examination. Nowadays, reading comprehension, which covers40points, is the highest flight in the NMET. The cloze text and the passage correction are also based on the reading comprehension. That is to say, if a student is very good at English reading, he or she can surely get a good mark, enjoy learning English in a more confident and relaxing way.However, most senior middle school students in western China find it is difficulty to improve their reading in English. Although many students devote most of their energy and time to reading, they are lacking of suitable reading strategies to make further progress. And it is know to all that the reason why people learn language is to express ourselves and to communicate with people. Therefore, it is urgent and necessary to improve students’ reading ability so that they can keep up with the pace of the modern society. Although reading is extremely important to improve the students’English competence, only to ask the students to read without training is surely not enough to improve the students’ reading ability. As teachers, we should help the students to read by themselves through reading learning and strategies. Only when we help the students to read by themselves, can we solve the worried reading-teaching situation in senior middle school. So it is worth making efforts to do some research into reading strategies and its raining and the author organized this investigation to help the students improve their reading in English in Wu Hai No.10Middle School.In order to check that the students’ reading competence can be improved by reading strategy training, the author chose only one hundred and twelve subjects from two classes in Senior Grade Two in Wu Hai No.10Middle School to take part in the research. They are from two different classes and the number of the students is the same and they are divided the two classes into an experimental class and a control class to make a comparison after introducing and training their reading strategies in and out class. In this study, a questionnaire is firstly used to survey the use of reading strategies for senior middle school students. Besides, the author also made a pre-test and a post-test in an experimental class and a control class to check the result for the comparison. And of course, a lot of training about reading strategies was conducted during the sixteen weeks between the two tests. And a lot of the students were also interviewed about their feelings of the function of reading strategies at the end of the experiment. At the end, the author made a conclusion that the senior middle school students’English reading competence can and should be improved by proper training.The thesis is made up of five chapters with appendix including questionnaire and tests materials provided in the appendices and reference parts. Chapter one begins with the current situation of the senior middle school students’reading competence. Since the students’reading in English is not good, it is quite urgent to improve their reading ability according to the development of the modern society and the requirements of the syllabus and curriculum for senior middle school students. Therefore, the purpose of the investigation is put forward in this section. The second part presents the theoretical review, which is related to reading and reading strategies both at home and abroad. The third chapter is about how the investigation and study is conducted in Wu Hai No.10Middle School; the significance of reading learning and strategies in Wu Hai No.10Middle School as well as the participants, organizers and training activities in this study are included in the section. In the fourth part, questionnaire, tests, interviews, and data are shown to check whether reading learning and strategies is an effective way and how it should be used and trained to improve students’ reading competence. The last section discusses the conclusion that is drawn from the thesis by analyzing the questionnaire, interviews and experiment. At the same time, the limitations also have been found in carrying out the reading learning and strategies investigation thus put forward some measures on how to make the students’ reading competence improved through reading strategies training in Wu Hai No.10Middle School much better.