An Empirical Study On English Reading Strategy Training Of Senior School Student

Reading instruction is always the focus of all language researchers. And clearly it plays asignificant part in the Second Language (L2) Teaching Approaches. For the L2learners, readingskills are necessary skills for them to succeed in L2learning, which can also be approved from L2learning theories. However, how to improve the reading ability is still the problem of most Chinesesenior school students at present. They find it hard for them to have good marks in readingcomprehension though they have already had quantities of daily reading exercises. Most studentsare poor at summarizing, searching for details in the reading passage and also inferring, whichmakes trouble for teachers in reading instruction.This study is based on L2Acquisition Theory and Cognitive Learning Theory. The contentsinvolve the definition and model of reading and three kinds of reading strategies which are lookingfor the main idea, searching for the details in the passage and making inferences. The studyparticipants are102freshmen in a senior school. They are given a reading comprehension pre-testbefore the reading strategy training and the same reading comprehension test as a post-test after3months. The data is analyzed with SPSS to examine the influence of reading strategies training.The experiment also includes two interviews. The aim of pre-interview is to investigate thecircumstance of students’ using reading strategies while the aim of post-interview is to get morefeedback from students about the reading strategy training to see whether the training is effective ornot. The research questions are as follows,(1) Is the reading strategy training effective in seniorschool reading instruction?(2) Is the reading strategy training effective to the students of high,medium or low reading comprehension abilities?(3) Among the three reading strategies, whichone is the most effective to all the participants.It can be proved by the study that the reading strategy training does increase the students’reading comprehension abilities, especially for those who are poor at reading comprehensionbefore. However, for those are good at reading comprehension before, they need more specificreading strategy training. Meanwhile, student has changed their reading procedure from up-bottommodel to bottom-up one. However, they still need time to turn their reading procedure to an interactive one, which leads us teachers to think a better way of reading instruction in the future.We suggest our English teacher should have a good knowledge of reading strategies, senior schoolstudents all need a systemic and long-term reading strategy training and the reading strategy shouldbe combined with daily reading instruction.