An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Predicting Strategy Training On Junior High School Students' English Reading Proficiency

According to the schema theory,reading is an interactive process between the text and the reader,a repetitive process of making,revising,and confirming or denying predictions based on readers' schemata,including linguistic schema,content schema and formal schema.Research has shown that predicting plays an essential role in reading comprehension.However,predicting strategy training has not been attached sufficient importance to in reading teaching.Thus,this research attempts to carry out an experiment to study the effects of predicting strategy training in the English teaching at junior high schools.Two specific questions are to be answered on the basis of empirical evidences:(1)Does predicting strategy training help to improve students' English reading proficiency?(2)How does predicting strategy training facilitate students' use of the strategy?120 students from two parallel classes in Grade Seven participated in this one-semester experiment.Before the training,a pre-training questionnaire was administrated to collect data on the participants' use of reading strategies and a pre-test conducted to guarantee that the English reading proficiency of the two classes was at the same level.In the experimental class,predicting strategy training was implemented under the guidance of schema theory and reading models,while the control class was not treated with the training.After 18 weeks' experiment,the subjects participated in the post-test and a reading strategy investigation with the same questionnaire.The data of tests and questionnaires were collected for comparison and analysis with SPSS 17.0.Both data of tests and questionnaires were analyzed with independent samples t-test.Results indicated that after one semester's training,there appears significant difference between the experimental class and the control class in students' English reading proficiency.It can be inferred that predicting strategy training positively influences the students' use of the strategy and their English reading proficiency.And the frequency of students' use of pre-reading prediction has increased the most greatly compared to the while-reading prediction and after-reading reinforcement and evaluation of prediction.The research findings implicate: Firstly,when teachers apply predicting strategy to reading teaching,they should meanwhile reinforce students' understanding of the interactive nature of reading,that is,students should be taught to take full advantage of the roles of titles,figures,topic sentences,signal words,genres or structures of texts to interact actively with the text and the writer.Secondly,teachers should constantly stimulate students' awareness to use the specific techniques of predicting in actual reading and connect them to their schemata with well-designed predicting activities,so that they will develop reading strategies consciously.Thirdly,during the training,teachers should give timely feedback and positive evaluation on students' use of reading strategies.