An Action Research On Reading Strategy Training To Students Of Rural Senior High School

Modern language teaching theories hold the view that the purpose of reading teaching is not simply to get the students to learn language knowledge.More importantly,by reading they should be guided to obtain information,learn culture and develop reading skills and strategies,which helps to lay the foundation for their continuing learning and lifelong development.Taking a look at the English college entrance examinations in recent years,one can see that the proportion of reading comprehension has gradually increased.In English teaching,students' reading ability can better reflect the depth and breadth of students' mastery of a language,which is an important part of the actual communicative competence of English.However,investigations have identified that students in high schools especially in rural areas still have many difficulties in English reading.Many students are lack of sufficient vocabulary and have difficulties in understanding long or difficult sentences.What's worse,many students show no interest in English reading because they are lack of appropriate reading strategies to make learning more effective.In view of the above problems,the present research tries to teach students some reading strategies and find out the effect of strategies training on reading through an action research.It tries to answer two research questions:(1)Can the reading strategy training activate the students' awareness of applying reading strategies when reading?(2)Can the reading strategy training improve the students' reading competence?The subjects involved in this research were 99 students in two ordinary classes from Senior Two in Qingyuan No.2 Senior High School.Research instruments include: tests(pre-test,post-test),questionnaires and interviews.The purpose of the pre-test is to analyze the students' achievement data and find out the “difficult” level of the students' using reading strategies.The post-test aims to examine the effect of reading strategy training on students' English reading competence and the awareness of students' applying reading strategies.The questionnaires are designed to understand the students' English learning habits and their understanding and use profile of English reading strategies.The interviews are organized to get the preliminary insights into students' attitudes,expectations,habits and difficulties in their English reading,as well as some background information related to their English learning.Two rounds of targeted teaching interventions which lasted 21 weeks were implemented in the English reading classes.The interventions involved:(1)consolidating and expanding the students' mastery of targeted vocabulary;(2)training of a number of basic reading strategies throughout the action research;(3)enhancing the students' syntax knowledge,especially when it comes to long and difficult sentences;(4)encouraging extensive reading in and after class with the aim of elevating the students' interest in English reading and cultivating their awareness of using reading strategies.Based on the analysis of the collected data,the action research gets the following findings:(1)The implementation of the action research and the teacher's reading strategies training could improve the students' reading competence to a great extent.(2)More students' English reading interest was arisen and their awareness of applying reading strategies was cultivated after the 21-week efforts with the teacher's reading strategies training.The present study shed light on English reading teaching in senior high schools.First,teachers should train the students to use appropriate reading strategies in English reading classes.Second,teachers should bear in mind that the ultimate goal of reading strategy training is to cultivate the students' interest in English reading and awareness of using reading strategies when reading.Third,teachers should supply the students with more authentic reading materials so as to develop their reading skills more effectively.