A Study On The Training Of Students’ English Reading Strategies In Senior High School

The Ministry of Education of our country formulated and implemented English Curriculum Standardsfor senior high school in2003, which emphasizes the importance of reading strategy in the senior Englishteaching. The present situation of classroom teaching shows that most English teachers value the result ofreading activities much more than the process of reading which focuses on the mental activities of thestudents and the strategies for English reading. And thus they fail to realize the importance of strategytraining in reading comprehension.Based on the reading model, the schema theory, and theories related to reading strategy, the authortries to answer the following two questions:1) What are the English reading strategies frequently used bySenior Three High School students in this study?2) what effects does the reading strategy training have onthe improvement of their reading competence?In order to seek the effective strategies to solve these issues, the author chooses50students in Grade3in Yuzhou No.5Middle School in Henan province as the subjects. Principally based upon the questionnaire,the comprehension tests and interviews, conclusions can be made as follows:Before the training, by analyzing the results from questionnaire and reading comprehension test,theauthor finds:29%of the participants can underline some key points to help the understanding of the entirereading, and scan for specific information while reading, and meanwhile the students who tend to guess themeaning of unfamiliar words take up24%of the total; on the other hand, only1%of the subjects try toanalyze the structure or genre of the target reading materials for better understanding. The author carriedout the experiment for about two months on the basis of the results derived from the previous stage. Afterthe training, based on the analysis of the results derived from the reading comprehension tests and theinterviews, conclusion can be made that: students’ overall ability in reading comprehension has beenimproved after the reading strategy training, especially for the intermediate students; weaker students feelmore confident after the training.The whole paper is composed of five chapters: Chapter1is a general introduction of the study.Chapter2gives a brief review of related theories, including reading model, schema theory, and theories involving reading strategies. Chapter3deals with research design, consisting of research questions,participants, instruments, and the detailed process of the study. Chapter4presents the analysis of the datacollected. Chapter5concludes the study, presenting the major findings of the research, some pedagogicalimplications, and offering some suggestions as well for further study.