Investigation And Study Of English Majors’ Engagement In Out-of-class English Reading

A survey, conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2007 and hosted by the chairman Professor Dana Gioia, shows that reading not only overwhelmingly correlates with better reading skills and is highly relevant to academic achievement, but affects people’s lives in crucial ways. At home, Chinese Academy of Press and Publication made a survey on national reading in 2013 and it proclaims that the result, compared with the developed countries, is not optimistic. For the students majoring in English, reading, one of the key input ways, plays an important role in the process of language learning, which has been proved to be an irrefragable fact. For this reason, researches on reading and reading teaching have been put a high value. However, the domestic relevant researches as early as 2006 stated that a common phenomenon of undergraduate belittling out-of-class reading occurs in universities and colleges. Does such phenomenon exist commonly in universities and colleges today? If it does, what is the degree like? These problems are worth further researching, and they are the reasons why such research topic is chose as well.Related literature shows that scholars abroad have made researches on reading from the perspective of study engagement. Inspired by the previous researches at home and abroad, and guided by the theories of learning engagement, the present study investigates students’reading engagement from three dimensions of learning engagement, which are cognitive engagement, behavioral engagement and affective engagement by employing quantitative and qualitative methods. The collected valid subjects of investigation are 156 sophomore students majoring in business English from Guangxi Normal University, Guilin University of Technology, and Lijiang College of Guangxi Normal University. The ultimate goal of the investigation is to answer the following questions:(1) what is the after-class English reading engagement status quo of English major? (2) Are there any significant differences of after-class English reading engagement between different universities? (3) What are the factors affecting students’ after-class English reading engagement? (4) Are there any effective ways to improve students’ after-class reading engagement of English?The results of investigation show that:(1) the current status quo of subjects’ after-class reading engagement of English is lower than threshold (M= 2.91, SD= 0.598, Min= 1.20, Max= 4.33); (2) there is NOT a significant difference between universities, but a significant difference exists between independent college and universities (F (2,153) = 8.31, p<0.05):Lijiang College of Guangxi Normal University gets significant higher score than Guangxi Normal University (MD= 0.568) and Guilin University of Technology (MD= 0.605); (3) the results of investigation also suggest that the factors affecting students’after-class reading engagement of English involve that students self-control capability, happy reading experiences, employment of reading skills and strategies, reading environment and reading motivation, etc.To solve the problems found in the present study, the suggestions for universities, teachers and students are proposed respectively as follows:(1) schools should establish self-access reading centers to provide enough reading places for students’ English after-class reading so as to create a thick reading atmosphere; (2) teachers should timely offer reading instructions according to their English teaching, and try to create conditions so as to help their students experience happy reading and stimulate reading interest; (3) students should improve their reading awareness, try to further realize the importance and necessity of after-class reading of English and promote their reading strategies.Due to the restrictions of unavoidable subjective and objective reasons, the limitations of the present study can be concluded as follows:the size and number of the sample can be enlarged to further improve the validity; the present study doesn’t involve deep researches on the relationship between reading results and reading engagement, between reading competence and reading engagement, and on whether there exist significant differences between English majors. Besides, the analysis and demonstration of existing problems found in this investigation can be further improved.