| Reading styles means a category of reading strategies that frequently used in the process of reading. According to Kirby(1988), the reading styles are divided into three types: analytic style, global style and synthetic style. Analytic readers tend to adopt a bottom-up model and focus on the identification of new words rather than the extraction of meaning. Global readers often use a top-down model and they generally employ their prior knowledge to understand the text but ignore the specific information in the text. Synthetic readers employ an interactive model and they can flexibly use the reading approaches of the two former styles. While reading, as a receptive skill, is playing a crucial role in language acquisition, and reading comprehension ability can be affected not only by different reading styles, but also by different text types and question types.Therefore, the present study is aimed to explore the non-English major students’ reading styles and the effects on reading comprehension performance in terms of different text types and question types. To be more specific, four major questions are to be discussed: 1) What is the general trend of non-English major students’ reading styles? 2) What is the distribution of different reading styles among different levels of reading proficiency? 3) What is the impact of students’ reading styles on reading comprehension performance in relation to text types(Narration; Exposition; Argumentation)? 4) What is the impact of students’ reading styles on reading comprehension performance in relation to question types(Global question; Local question)?This study employs both quantitative and qualitative approaches to collect the data. The quantitative study is conducted on 150 non-English major sophomores from Nanchang University. During the study, the subjects were informed to do a questionnaire about reading style and a reading comprehension test. The reading style questionnaire is designed according to the fifth part of Oxford’s(1993) SAS(Styles Analysis Survey): How I deal with ideas. The reading comprehension test consists of three text types(Narration, Exposition, Argumentation) selected from CET-4 Reading Comprehension Stimulation Training. All statistics are collected and analyzed by SPSS 17.0. Apart from the quantitative research, the qualitative study is also conducted in the present study. 6 different typical subjects were chosen to be interviewed. The oral interviews are recorded to provide support for the quantitative research.The following findings are found out in this study. Firstly, the non-English major students generally adopt the global reading style, the synthetic reading style ranks the second, and the analytic reading style is the least prevalent style. Plus, students with higher level of reading proficiency have more tendency of adopting the synthetic style. Secondly, in terms of different text types, there is no effect of different reading styles on narrative reading comprehension performance, but significant difference exists respectively between the synthetic and the global styles and between the synthetic and the analytic styles in the expository text; there is also a significant difference between the synthetic and global styles in argumentative text. Finally, in terms of the question types, there exist effects of reading styles on global question and local question. The synthetic readers perform better than the global and analytic readers in tackling both the local and global questions. Besides, the global readers are skilled at the global question whereas the analytic readers are better at the local question.The implications of the present study are presented. On the one hand, the English teachers should know the students’ reading styles and flexibly rearrange their teaching methods to better suit the needs of students with different reading styles. On the other hand, the students should be instructed to make sense of their reading styles and correctly employ the reading strategies to improve their reading proficiency. |
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