An Empirical Study On Reading Strategy Training For Vocational School Students

Fostering the students’ reading ability is emphasized as the goal of senior Englishteaching in the New Curriculum Standard of English (2003). But the current situation invocational school is not satisfied and the students get lower marks in the reading part ofCounterpart Entrance Examination. Therefore, it’s not essential but also urgent to research andfind the way to improve the students’ reading ability.From the perspective of the schema theory and cognitive theory of Anderson (Anderson,1983), the thesis sorted and analyzed the related literature on learning strategies, readingstrategies and strategy training. Two classes of Chengde County Vocational School, HebeiProvince,2013Tourism Management Class (32students) and2013Electronics Class (30students) were chosen to be the subjects. A questionnaire and a pre-reading test wereconducted among them to reveal the reading strategy use of the subjects by employing thequantitative approach.2013Electronics Class was chosen as the control class, who receivedthe grammar-based method teaching which is always used in reading class.And theexperimental class (2013Tourism Management Class), who was divided into three groups:8students strong learners,16average students and8weak learners, received an explicit readingstrategy training lasted16weeks. The five trained strategies are designed to improve thestudents’ ability of handling the multiple choice of reading comprehension in the CounterpartEntrance Examination and the training model is drawing on the model of Pearson and Dole.At the same time, an interview was supplemented to understand the students’ attitude towardsthe strategy training and consciousness of strategy use during the process of strategy training.The contrast of the data analysis before and after shows that the reading strategies training canimprove the students’ consciousness of strategy use, improve their reading comprehensionability and reading strategies can be conducted effectively in vocational school. The authorhave got the following three discoveries in this research:1.vocational school students mostlyhave a weak consciousness of reading strategies and therefore do not make good use ofreading strategies frequently;2.training the students with the English reading strategies ofpredicting, skimming, scanning, word-meaning guessing and inference can obviously enhance the students’ reading ability;3.the average students make greater progress than the strong andthe weak groups of students, and at the same time, they use the reading strategies moreeffectively and frequently.