A Case Study On The English Reading Test-taking Strategies Used By The Students In Senior Three

Reading is one of the input channels of language learning,meanwhile English reading is also an important way to improve the students' English proficiency.There are three reading tasks,a total of sixty points,accounting for half of the full marks of Jiangsu Province college entrance English examination,including cloze,reading comprehension and task-based reading.However,only paying attention to the quantity of reading is more often than not difficult to improve the students' English reading scores.Therefore the author has done the English reading test-taking strategies research in order to find the useful English reading test-taking strategies in the future English Reading Teaching of the students in Senior three.From the 1970s,the scholars have commenced to do researches on the test-taking strategies of learners' second language learning examinations,especially the reading test-taking strategies.Most of the previous studies have concluded that only the language high proficiency students could take corresponding reading task-taking strategies properly.The results have shown that the language high proficiency students could use reading test-taking strategies frequently and accurately than the language low proficiency students.Few studies have been conducted that the language low proficiency students could use reading test-taking strategies appropriately in the reading examinations.The study is different from other studies in it has done researches on the English reading test-taking strategies of the three types college entrance English reading examination synthetically.At the same time,the students were classified as one group learning art and the other not.Researches were done on the different use of the English reading test-taking strategies of the two groups.In addition,the top three frequently used English reading test-taking strategies of the English high,medium and low achievers were calculated.However,the results obtained were different from the previous scholars',which also showed that it was necessary to do research on the students in Senior three.In the study,Barati's questionnaire items were analyzed and some problematic items were modified.In addition,the intrinsic consistency Cronbach alpha coefficient was tested as well.According to the test-taking strategies of English reading questionnaire filled by 234 students in senior three and the reading scores selected from the students' third mock examination,through the study of a set of Pearson correlation analyses for students and students who do not learn art respectively,the correlations between the test-taking strategies of English reading and three types English reading achievement were examined.A set of Pearson Chi-square analyses were used to explore the four types test-taking strategies of English reading used by three English proficiency groups and three types English reading achievement.At the same time,the three most frequently used test-taking strategies of English reading were also counted.Furthermore,according to the results of the study,five randomly selected students were interviewed.Through the analysis of the experimental data and the interview of the students,the following results are obtained:1.The test-taking strategies of English reading were correlated to the cloze and task-based reading achievement of the students in Senior three.The art students performed not as good as students who do not learn art,while high and low proficiency test-takers achieved much better than the intermediate ones.2.The most frequently used English reading test-taking strategies used by high English proficiency students include three monitoring strategies,one evaluation strategy and two test-wise strategies.The most frequently used English reading test-taking strategies used by medium English proficiency students include one monitoring strategy and three test-wise strategies.The most frequently used English reading test-taking strategies used by low English proficiency students include two monitoring strategies and two test-wise strategies.The monitoring strategies and the test-wise strategies were more frequently used of the twenty seven test-taking strategies of English reading.3.Through the interviews of the students,the author found it was widely believed that English reading test-taking strategies can effectively help students' reading test.English reading test-taking strategies not only in large extent could mobilize the enthusiasm of students to read,but also help students improve their reading achievement.This study contributed to know the English reading test-taking strategies used by the students in Senior three,which played a positive role in guiding English reading teaching in the future.