A Study Of The Correlation Between Teaching Strategies And Students’ English Reading Ability

Reading plays a decisive part in the Basic English Teaching. Being the mostimportant way to get information and the key to most of knowledge from writtenlanguage, reading has not only become the principal purpose, but also the majormeans of English learning. It is universally acknowledged that reading is a highlyfrequent input for foreign language learning to the senior high school students. TheNew Curriculum Standards (2003) for Senior High School emphasizes reading skills,learning strategies and improving reading ability. It requires a senior high schoolstudent to read about300,000words. Nowadays, Chinese high school students areoften required to read the long passage in a short time in an English test. In addition,most of the students are not good at using reading strategies. Meanwhile, someteachers do not realize the importance of reading strategies for improving students’reading ability, either. These will lead to little progress for students. Although there isno shortage of research papers on learning strategies on reading, most of them attemptto probe reading strategies use in colleges and universities while relatively few havebeen devoted to the study of the correlation between teaching strategies and students’English reading ability in senior high schools.With such understanding, the present study, which is based on the findings oflearning strategy, teaching strategy and interactive reading theory, focuses on findingsome ways to assist English teachers in middle schools in developing pedagogicstrategies in English reading course as well as improving their students’ Englishreading ability. In order to achieve the goal, the dissertation tries to answer thefollowing questions:1) What reading strategies do the students often use in their Englishreading?2) What teaching strategies do the teachers often use in their Englishreading course?3) Is there any correlation between the teacher’s teaching strategies and thestudents’ English reading ability?With these questions, the researcher of this study investigated the current situation of teaching strategies in English reading course in a senior school inBaoshan County, Yunnan Province. There are112students and8teachers taking partin the surveys from No.1Middle School in Baoshan. Based on Oxford’s (1990)theory of reading strategies, the researcher analyzed the responses from the studentswith the help of SPSS.The following conclusions have been drawn from the research:1).The students’ reading ability of Baoshan No.1Middle School is at the middlelevel. Half of the participants’ scores of the pre-test are between29and20. The Meanof the participants’ scores of the pre-test is21.3415.2).When these students read the passage, they always use some readingstrategies mechanically. The application frequency of cognitive strategies is higherthan the application frequency of meta-cognitive strategies. Among all the strategies,the average of cognitive strategies was3.17and the average of meta-cognitivestrategies was2.94.3). All the teachers have admitted having introduced the reading strategies to thestudents but the practice of reading strategies was less.Most of the teachers like dividing the reading lesson into three parts: pre-reading,while-reading and post-reading. And most of the teachers teach their students to usereading skills in their English reading course, such as skimming, scanning, predictionand so on.At the end of the thesis, some suggestions on how to train reading strategies aregiven for reading class in middle schools.