| Reading plays an important part in today’s English teaching and learning in senior middle schools. Through reading, not only students’ language knowledge, but also their other language skills and competence can be developed. In addition, reading plays an essential part in the National Matriculation Entrance Test (NMET). Therefore, in China’s senior high school ELT, both teachers and students pay special attention to reading teaching and learning. However, the results of reading tests are not satisfying. The reading proficiency of senior high school students need to be improved as soon as possible. In recent years, many researches have verified that the proper use of English reading strategies is a key factor in improving the students’ English reading ability. The present study attempts to explore how high school students employ strategies in their reading.In the view of second language learning strategies, reading strategies and O’Malley and Chamot’s (1990) classification of learning strategies, this research focused on the current situation of reading strategies used by students in senior Grade Two through the instruments of the questionnaire and the comprehension test. And it aims to answer the following three research questions:(1)What are the overall characteristics of reading strategies employed by the students in Grade Two of senior high schools? (2)What are the differences between efficient and non-efficient readers in the use of reading strategies? (3)What are the problems of reading strategy use revealed in reading comprehension test? After analyzing the data collected from the investigation by applying the software SPSS, we got the following results:(1) the frequency of overall applicationof reading strategies of senior two students is in a media level. (2) Judging from the means of the use of these strategies, students employed the affective strategies the most, cognitive strategies more, metacognitive strategies less and social strategies the least. (3) good readers apply these strategies more frequently and appropriately than poor readers. (4) most senior students have some trouble in deep understanding, word-guessing, inductive inferencing and summarizing.According to the final results of the study, the paper put forward some implications for the teachers to change this situation discussed in this paper, and it also talks about the limitations of the present study and suggestions for future study. |
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