A Study On The Cultivation Of English Reading Strategies In Senior High Schools

Reading is one of the four basic skills(listening, speaking, reading and writing) in English learning, and is the main language in-put approach. Reading is highly emphasized in English learning in senior high schools. It takes up too much time and energy of teachers’ and students’, but in practice the teaching efficiency is low. Students are poor in English reading comprehension. In traditional English teaching, teachers only concentrate on textual information and skills,but they neglect the cultivation and reinforcement of reading strategies. The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(the Ministry of Education, 2003) stresses that senior high school students should develop their own appropriate strategies and choose different learning strategies to improve their own abilities to obtain and deal with information, and abilities to analyze and solve problems. That will establish a good foundation for their future development and learning in their life. For those reasons above, the author decided to look at the effects of English reading strategy cultivation for senior high school students in order to find out how to improve their reading comprehension effectively and promote their marks.The empirical research is intended to find out the effects that the cultivation of English reading strategies has on the improvement of students’ reading comprehension by means of pre-test, post-test and administering questionnaire surveys. The specific research questions are as follows:1) What reading strategies do students use in English reading comprehension?2) What effects does the cultivation of English reading strategies have on students’ awareness of reading strategies?3) Can the cultivation of English reading strategies improve students’ reading comprehension?At the beginning of the experiment, in order to learn about the profile of the students’ English reading strategies, the author administered the pre-test questionnaire survey to determine the specific English reading strategies involved in the cultivation. Before the experiment, the students from Class 19 and Class 20 were pre-tested on English reading comprehension. The results were analyzed by SPSS 19(Statistical Package for Social Science 19) to see whether there was any statistical difference in the scores of the two classes. Because difference didn’t exist, the experiment was conducted as planned. Class 19 was chosen as the experimental class, while Class 20 was chosen as the control class. The experimental class received English reading strategy cultivation for a term. The author adopted the explicit means of reading strategy cultivation. At the end of the research, all the students in the present study were post-tested on reading comprehension to look at the effects of English reading strategy cultivation.The findings in the research indicated that the explicit cultivation of English reading strategies improved the students’ reading comprehension effectively. Besides, the contrast between the results collected in two questionnaire surveys suggested that the students developed their awareness of English reading strategies. The present study has both methodological implications and practical implications. Methodologically, teachers in senior high schools should strengthen their own awareness of reading strategy cultivation and make reading strategy cultivation as part of the curriculum to foster students’ English reading strategies and help students to become autonomous and self-directed learners. In practical teaching, teachers should embed reading strategies into the processes of pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading to improve students’ English reading comprehension proficiency.The cultivation of English reading strategies in the present research is carried out based on meta-cognitive and cognitive reading strategies, among which skimming, scanning, predicting, inferring, and summarizing are often tested in examinations. Through the cultivation of English reading strategies, the common reading strategies can be practiced and reinforced so as to improve students’ reading comprehension and reading speed. The author hopes the present research can provide some useful practice for teachers and students in senior high schools.