A Contrastive Study On The Use Of English Reading Strategies Between Urban And Rural High School Students

The role that reading plays in language learning has received wide attention among most people.However,students may encounter several difficulties during the reading process,and their reading barriers have directly influenced their integrating language competence.Giving consideration to this,effective measures are needed to improve the current English reading teaching.Fortunately,proper use of reading strategies is a key factor in improving students’ reading level.In recent years,many scholars have begun to study the use of English reading strategies among senior high schools.However,few of them have tried to make a contrastive study of English reading strategies between students in the urban high school with those in the rural high school.In response to this,the thesis conducts an experiment on 220 students from two schools in Weinan,in which one is urban high school and the other is rural high school,for the sake of investigating students’ use of English reading strategies.Meanwhile,the data collected in the experiment are analyzed by SPSS 19.0.Afterwards,a contrastive study is made to find out if there exist any differences between the students from the urban high school and the rural high school so as to find out effective ways of cultivating students’ English reading strategies.The main results of this study are as follows:There exist significant differences between students of urban high school and rural high school in the use of the metacognitive strategy,the cognitive strategy and the social affective strategy.The use of the three reading strategies in rural high school students is higher than that of the urban high school students.Besides,within the three strategies,students in both urban high school and rural high school use the metacognitive strategy least.In the contrast of the use of English reading strategies among students of the same gender from the two schools,there exist significant differences between urban high school girls and rural high school ones,as well as urban high school boys and rural high school ones,in the use of the metacognitive strategy,the cognitive strategy,the social affective strategy and overall strategy.Moreover,the girls’ use of the three reading strategies in urban high school is higher than that of the girls in rural high school,and the same phenomenon is found among that of the boys.Through the study,the following conclusions can be drawn as follows:Firstly,the students’ use of English reading strategies in rural high school is lower than that of the students in urban high school.Moreover,both of them use metacognitive strategy least within the three strategies.Secondly,the students of the same gender in urban high school and rural high school have significant differences in using the metacognitive strategy,the cognitive strategy and the social affective strategy.In general,the girls’ use of the three reading strategies in urban high school is higher than that of the girls in rural high school,so is that of the boys.Thirdly,the standard deviation of reading strategies in rural high school students is higher than that of urban high school students,which means that the use of English reading strategies in rural high school is uneven.This requires teachers care more about the poor students,help them find effective learning method and improve their learning initiative and interest.