An Empirical Study Of Reading Strategy Training Of Senior Middle School Students In Shanghai

Reading strategies refer to strategies employed by language learners to improve their reading comprehension, which has drawn increasing attention in the past few decades. With50senior middle school students from Shanghai as its subject, the present study aims to look into the current status of the students’awareness and application of reading strategies and the possible effects of reading strategy training on students’reading performance among senior middle school students.The instruments of the research are questionnaire survey, pretest and posttest of reading and interviews. Firstly, the questionnaire survey is conducted to investigate students’employment of reading strategies, followed by the pretest of reading to assess the reading ability of students in the experimental group and the control group. Secondly, the reading strategy training based on Chamot and O’Malley’s approach is carried out in the experimental class over a period of sixteen weeks. Finally, students in the experimental group and the control group take the posttest to see the difference and some students are interviewed to gather more information.Major findings based on data analysis and the interview are as follows:(1) At present, senior high school students in Shanghai consciously employ some reading strategies, but there exist differences among the employment of different strategies, among which cognitive strategies are employed the most frequently.(2) Explicit reading strategy training is beneficial to the improvement of students’reading ability.(3)Students involved are generally supportive of the inclusion of learning strategies in their English learning.