A Study On The Effective Training Of Students’ English Reading Strategies In Senior High School

Reading acts as the bridge and link between the learners and the reading materials, which will contribute to their understanding of the information exactly from the reading materials. At the same time, reading serves as a language tool of acquiring and exchanging information for learners. Therefore, it is more significant to improve students’ reading comprehension ability. However, reading is an abstract mental process, with a rather complex psychological and intellective activity. Therefore, even though teachers and students have made their efforts to English, the results have frustrated both of them all along.It is prevalent that teachers have adopted the traditional teaching method for many years. However, this method shows more and more shortcomings with the further development of teaching theory. Hence, the new methods of teaching will inevitably be around the corner with the self-improvement of teachers. Since 1970 s, based on further development of learning research, an increasing number of researchers have begun to try their best to analyze the rationality of the strategy training. And of course, there exist some doubts about the effectiveness and rationality of the strategy training. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct the study to verify the effectiveness of the strategy training.This study intends to test the effectiveness and rationality of reading strategy training in senior high school, Grade One by comparing effects of the two teaching methods on students’ reading abilities. And the author attempts to get the answers by the following research questions:(1) What are the reading strategies frequently employed among senior one student?(2) What are the effects of the strategy training on students’ reading comprehension proficiency?(3) What are the students’ attitude towards reading strategy and reading strategy training?In this study, the author takes three kinds of main reading strategies, meta-cognitive strategies, cognitive strategies, social/affect strategies, to improve the students’ reading ability. And in the study, in order to verify the proficiency of the strategy training on students’ reading ability, the combination of the quantitative and qualitative method is adopted by the author. The subjects who are selected from Middle School Affiliated to Henan Normal University are from two different classes, senior one, with 87 students in total. The 44 students who are from Class 7 are regarded as the experimental group(EG) and the author is their teacher. And the other 43 students in Class 8, taught by another teacher, are regarded as the control group(CG). The two classes’ English scores are almost at the same level. In order to make a validity comparison, the EG receives explicit reading strategies training for a semester, while the CG still receives prior methods of teaching. In this way the author can analyze the differences of pre-test and post-test on EG, the differences of questionnaire within the EG; and the differences between the EG and CG on the designed questionnaire. The reason why author trains them by using two different teaching methods is that it is clearer to keep an eye on the gap between the two groups before and after the training. At last the data are collected, trimmed and put into the computer, and then analyzed by the SPSS 10.0. Finally, the quantitative results show:(1) Senior one high school students seldom use the reading strategies, and even have no consciousness on reading strategies;(2) Reading strategy training can improve students’ reading comprehension proficiency. And the author conducts an interview to the EG, so the results of interview show:(3) the participants hold approbatory attitude towards reading strategies training, which improve students’ interests, motivation, and initiative to English.Above all, the reading strategy training has significant effects on students through the study, and what is more, the reliability and validity of the training are also demonstrated, which provides more constructive implications and suggestions to the teaching in the future.