A Research Of The Application Of Word-guessing Strategies In English Reading Instruction Of Senior High Schools

Recent years have witnessed an increasing emphasis on students'reading comprehension ability.At present,the focus is normally put on the cultivation of students' understanding of the content rather than the grammatical knowledge in English reading.When it comes to reading,many students run into trouble due to problems such as lack of background knowledge,insufficient grammatical knowledge and limited vocabulary.Chen Xilin(2014),a prominent English teacher,points out that one of the major reasons why students lose scores on reading comprehension in College Entrance Examination is their lack of vocabulary.When continually confronted with unknown words and knowing nothing about how to tackle with them,students tend to feel at a loss and end up in failure.Therefore,it is in urgent need to guide students to use word-guessing strategies to facilitate their reading comprehension.Previous researches have already confirmed the positive role that word-guessing strategies play in helping college students comprehend reading materials.However,researches about whether word-guessing strategies are equally beneficial for senior high school students are rather limited.In order to prove that word-guessing strategies also contribute to the reading comprehension ability of students in senior high schools,this thesis will demonstrate that through the discussion on the following two questions:1)Do factors including teachers,students and texts mainly influence senior high school students' using of word-guessing strategies?2)What kind of influence can be made on the reading comprehension ability of senior high school students after they receive a period of training on word-guessing strategies?The research,which was conducted under the theoretical guidance of Input Hypothesis and Constructivism theory,lasted a semester and the research subjects were two grade one classes from a senior high school which have similar level.The author taught word-guessing strategies in the experimental class(EC)while mentioned nothing about them in the controlled class(CC).Copies of questionnaire were delivered to the EC prior to the experiment,a pretest and a post-test were also conducted in these two classes.Results of these were later collected and processed through SPSS V 21.0.What has been indicated from the research result is that:1)The ability of senior high school students to grasp and apply word-guessing strategies is susceptible to three major factors:teachers,texts and students themselves;2)In the meantime,there is visible improvement on students' word-guessing ability and reading comprehension ability after they have received a certain period of training.The research has proved the significance of word-guessing strategies in helping high school students comprehend reading materials and pointed out that the combination of word-guessing strategies with reading instruction of senior high schools is worth trying.