The Research On The English Reading Strategies For Second-year Students Of Senior Middle School

In the reform of Chinese basic education, reading is a major part of English learning.Improving the students’ English reading ability is an important goal in senior middle schoolEnglish teaching. In order to farther understand the situation of Grade2students in seniormiddle school，this thesis mainly investigates the reading strategy use of the students so as toprovide reference for the English reading teaching.In this thesis，90students were selected randomly, and they were asked to fill out thequestionnaires. The thesis aims to answer the following questions:1. What is the general situation of reading strategy employment among the second yearstudents?2.What is the strategy use in each dimension?3.What are the gender-related differences between male and female students in theapplication of reading strategy?4.What is the correlation between students’ scores and reading strategy use?There were85valid questionnaires. Then the data were analyzed by SPSS19.0. Thestatistical analysis was conducted in accordance with the average range of learning strategiesemployment frequency formulated by Oxford. The results are as follows:1.The general employment of reading strategies is moderate in senior high school. Themost frequently used reading strategy is affective reading strategies, then social strategiesfollowed by cognitive reading strategies. Meta-cognitive reading strategies is the leastfrequently adopted.2.Cognitive strategies is the most important of the four reading strategies, but they arenot actually frequently employed by students; a lot of students otfen turn to translating,skipping and skimming when they encounter dififculties in reading. Such behavior results inthe words guessing strategy being neglected. The use of meta-cognitive reading strategies instudents is even less frequent than the cognitive ones and most students lack self-evaluation and plans for extracurricular readings. Students should keep relaxed and confident when theyread, and then they will have a strong sense of achievement atfer finishing an English article.The vast majority of students prefer to read independently rather than communicate with theirclassmates and they only seek explanations from others when they encounter difficulties.3.Both male and female students only have significant difference in affective readingstrategies, but there are no significant differences in the other three strategy dimensions. Eventhough both genders have scored really high, the scores of boys are generally higher than thatof girls.4.There is signiifcant difference between the high-score students and the low-scorestudents in the use of reading strategies. Among these four strategies，significant difference isonly shown in the use of cognitive reading strategies.Based on the findings, it is suggested that teachers should research the reading strategiesand change traditional concepts to train the reading strategies of students.