An Experimental Study Of English Reading Strategies Of Senior High School Students

Nowadays, in the society marked with information explosion, reading, as a main means of capturing information, is drawing more and more attention. What’s more, reading plays an important role in the NMET for Grade3students in Senior High Middle School as reading occupies one third of the proportion in the total score of it. For them, it is crucial to increase their marks in the limited time. And the teaching of reading strategies training on reading comprehension and reading scores have significant correlation, however, the relevant data are not sufficient for English teachers who give lectures to Grade3students in Senior High Middle School to refer. Keeping that in mind, the researcher carry out this study with the major purpose to explore the effects of explicit reading instruction on the third-year senior high school students’ strategy use frequency and reading performance. Specifically, this study attempts to explore the following three questions:1) what kind of reading sub-strategies do students use most and least in the course of reading comprehension.2) What effects does the reading strategy instruction have on strategy use frequency and reading performance of the third-year high school students?3) After the instruction, what abilities of sub-reading strategy applied do students improve most?In order to find the answers to those questions, the present study is carried out by using two questionnaires and one experimental study.The pre-questionnaire is dealt with among84third-year senior high middle school students, attempting to know what kinds of reading sub-strategies students use most and least. In the later study, the related strategy instruction is followed.The post-questionnaire is conducted between an intervention group and a control group to find out whether the strategy use frequency differs between the two groups or not.Based on the questionnaires, the experimental study, aiming to find out the relationship between the reading strategy instruction and its effects on students reading performance, lasts for one semester from September2011to January2012. It is conducted among students of Class111and Class112, who entered Qiancheng School in September2009, in the course of English. Altogether41students in Class111act as the intervention group and43students in Class112as the control group. The instruction is carried out based on the CALLA1Model by applying the thinking-aloud instructional method. The data from this study are processed by a series of statistical measures.Based upon language learning strategy, reading theory, reading strategies and reading strategy-based training, the relationship between reading strategy instruction and reading performance has been deeply explored. There are four major findings from this study:1) Out of the four reading sub-strategies identified in this study (lexical and syntactic organization, summary, prediction and inference, and text organization), senior high school students use text organization strategies least while the lexical and syntactic organization strategy most.2) Reading strategy-based instruction can wake the strategy use consciousness of students and improve their strategy use frequency.3) Reading strategy-based instruction is helpful to improve students’reading performance to some extent, which is against some conclusions made by some researchers (Chen Caihong (2007), Tao Yang,2006, Ma Yonggang,2004) arguing that reading strategy training can greatly improve students’reading performance.4) The ability of applying the summary and text organization strategy is improved after instruction while inference for meaning not.Thus, the dissertation concludes that reading strategy-based training is helpful to improve students’reading performance to some extent although it is not as significant as it is supposed to be, and that the strategy awareness of students, however, can be improved a lot. At the same time, the study provides several practical implications for reading instruction and research:1) One task of high school reading instruction in China is to improve students’reading comprehension ability by laying more emphases on text organization strategy.2) It is making students be aware of strategies in general that makes reading strategy accessible.3) CALLA Model can be explored and organized based on the characteristics of different group of students’actual strategy use.4) Both teacher-modeling method and thinking-aloud instructional methods can be combined together in reading strategy instruction, which can help students know how to choose strategy and how to use them properly.Although there are some limitations of this study, implications from it and suggestions for future study are still supposed to be beneficial for language teachers to organize reading instruction and identify emphasis of strategy instruction.