Effects Of Thinking Styles On Students' English Reading Strategies In Senior High Schools

Reading strategy is a conscious learning approach that learners use to promote understanding of reading text.Students who own different thinking styles have different preferences for reading strategies.Although thinking styles are not good or bad,the reading strategy selection under its guidance has a great influence on students' reading comprehension and problems-solving efficiency.Therefore,studying the effects of thinking styles on reading strategies will help students optimize their reading strategies and enhance reading skills.This paper mainly explored the effects of students' thinking styles on English reading strategies in senior high school.The participants were 200 senior high school students from No.2 Xinjian High School and Nanchang foreign language school.The research instruments employed to collect data were a Thinking Style Inventory(Cronbach's alpha=.889)designed by Sternberg and revised by Li-Fang Zhang as well as a revised English Reading Questionnaire(Cronbach's alpha=.904)which is based on O'Malley and Chamot's strategy classification.The collected data were analyzed by the statistical software of SPSS17.0,and it adopted the descriptive analysis,independent sample T-test,Pearson correlation analysis and Regression analysis to answer the following four questions:1.What are the overall features of the thinking styles in relation to the senior high school students here mentioned?2.What are the general pictures of English reading strategies use in relation to the senior high school students here mentioned?3.Is there any statistically significant correlation between senior high school students' thinking styles and their reading strategies? If so,to what degree?4.Which categories,of the thinking styles,may most effectively predict the students' reading strategy use?Findings were shown as follows:1.The overall features of senior high school students' thinking styles is that students tend to be legislative,liberal,external styles,not to be oligarchic,local and anarchic styles.Male students are often legislative,executive and liberal styles,while female students tend to be monarchic and conservative styles.But only in liberal style the difference reached the significant level.Senior 1 students got higher scores inmonarchic,oligarchic and internal styles,while senior 2 students got higher scores in legislative,judicial,external and liberal styles.The difference reached a very significant level in external style and monarchic style.2.The overall frequency of English reading strategies used by senior students is in medium level.Meta-cognitive strategy is utilized most frequently,and social/affective strategy is the least one.Female students are more apt to use self-evaluating and cooperation strategies than male students.Senior 1 students prefer advanced organization and selective attention strategies,while senior 2 students prefer deduction and affection strategies,and the difference reached a very significant level.3.Correlation exists between students' thinking styles and their choice of reading strategies.Students with legislative(r=.315,p=.000)and liberal styles(r=.190,p=.008)tend to employ inference strategy;students with the external(r=.204,p=.004)and global(r=.221,p=.002)styles prefer to employ deduction strategy;self-monitoring strategy is extremely significantly correlated with local(r=.189,p=.008)and executive(r=.202,p=.005)thinking styles.4.Thinking styles can effectively predict the use of reading strategies.Type I thinking style can significantly predict advanced organization(F=6.767,P=.010),directive attention(F=7.674,P=.006),deduction(F=10.100,P=.002)and transfer(F=5.974,P=.015)strategies.Type II thinking style can significantly predict the planning and arranging(F=7.626,P=.006),self-monitoring(F=5.156,P=.024)strategies.Type III thinking style can significantly predict inference(F=6.853,P=.010)strategy.This study provides several important implications for English reading teaching and learning.Students should be skilled at exploring and being familiar with their own thinking styles.Choosing suitable reading strategies to improve reading achievement.In order to better match the student's thinking styles with reading strategies,teachers should not only realize the differences between students' thinking styles,but also strengthen the reading strategies training in classroom.