A Study On English Reading Strategy Training In Senior High School

Reading ability is one of the most important abilities in learning a language, and at thesame time, reading is the weak part of Chinese learners of English. However, reading is amost effective way for students to obtain language knowledge and improve reading skills.The overall goal of National English Curriculum Standards of Senior High School is tocultivate students’ autonomous learning ability, and the English curriculum standardstipulates one of the goals of English teaching is to develop students’ ability to use learningstrategies. Therefore, English learning strategies, especially the cultivation of readingstrategies has very important effect on the students. In English reading teaching at home,especially the teaching in the underdeveloped south-western regions, many teachers do nothave consciousness to cultivate the students’ ability to use reading strategies, and as a result,it was found that training reading strategies and skills in reading classroom wasinadequately done through the investigation on the reading teaching in Grade Two of Zhengan No1high school. So how to improve students reading abilities is an issue worth probinginto for the objective of cultivating students English reading strategies and improvingstudents reading abilities.This thesis reviewed relevant theories and models on English learning strategies andEnglish reading strategies training. Under these theoretical frameworks and considering thestudents’ learning status and teaching aims, the author designed training targets and trainingplan for training students’ reading skills and strategies. Thus, a thirteen-week training wasconducted for the students so as to explore the result of reading strategy training to knowwhether the students’ awareness in reading strategy has improved or not, to what degree?The research also desires to know the effectiveness in cultivating these strategies in theprocess of teaching. The research aims to answer the following questions:(1) Could the reading strategies training help to raise the students’ awareness of the readingstrategy?(2) Would strategy training in this way improve the strategy use of students who haveparticipated in the training? If the answer is positive, which strategy use can be improved? This study adopted a quantitative and qualitative approach through an experiment inreading training. The experiment was divided into two stages. The first stage involvedquestionnaire survey to find out the situation of reading strategies use; for the second stage,the strategy training was carried out. Ten of the students who had comparatively strongEnglish learning motivation were chosen as the participants in the experiment. The data ofpre-and-post tests and the survey of questionnaire were statistically processed and analyzedthrough the independent sample tests by SPSS19.0. According to comparison and analysisof the results it was found that reading strategy training has positive effects, firstly, onlifting the students’ learning strategy awareness; secondly, on students’ readingcomprehension proficiency and reading comprehension ability; thirdly, on improvement ofreading strategies use. Therefore, English strategies training is effective and applicable inthe senior high schools that are located in the underdeveloped regions.