A Study On The English Reading Strategy Training Among Senior High Students With Different Cognitive Styles

For senior high students,reading is one of the basic skills that they have to master,and it is also an important part in the College Entrance Examination.In fact,reading a lot helps improve their reading ability,enlarge their vocabulary and broaden their horizon.However,the author finds many students can't use reading strategies properly,which leads to low reading efficiency.In order to improve the situation and develop the students' awareness of using strategies,the author studied the international recognized classification of reading strategies brought up by O'Mally,Chamot(1990)?Oxford(1990),carried out a study on the use of reading strategies from cognitive strategy,meta-cognitive strategy and social-affective strategy.The study can help improve the students' reading competence and lay a strong foundation for the future development.The following questions are mainly discussed in the study: 1.What are the situations of the Senior High students' FI/FD cognitive styles and their English reading strategies?2.What are the differences in the use of English reading strategies among senior high students with FI/FD cognitive styles? 3.Will FD/FI subjects' awearness of using English reading strategies improve after reading strategy training?The author chose 50 Senior Three students from the same class as the subjects.And the author studied the three questions by means of Group Embedded Figure Test,English Reading Strategy Questionnaire,Reading Comprehension Test,English Reading Strategy Training and an Interview and collected the related data to analyze,meanwhile the author drew some conclusions:1.The Group Embedded Figure Test shows the proportion of FD is slightly higher than that of FI.And for the use of English reading strategy,the most frequently used strategy among the subjects is cognitive strategy and the next comes meta-cognitive strategy,the last and the least used strategy is social-affective strategy.2.For the use of meta-cognitive strategy,among FD subjects,students choose different aspects of selective attention.The aspects include the following items in the English reading strategy questionnaire: item 11(I will try to find the key points in the reading materials and questions),item12((I often analyze the structure of a reading passage and pay attention to the title and sub-title.),item 13(I tend to understand the materials and questions by recalling some related information),item 14(I will go through the reading material to look for the key words or sentences)and item 15(I focus on some difficult parts in the reading passage),especially the item12 and item 14.And FD subjects don't often use the strategy of planning.However,FI subjects seldom use strategy of self-evaluation,planning and ignore the aspect 15 of selective attention,but focused more on the aspect 10 and 11 of selective attention.For the use of cognitive strategy,FD subjects ignore reasoning andguessing according to the context,and they preferred to use the strategy of repetition and note-taking.However,FI subjects seldom or never use the strategy of guessing and inference,meanwhile,they often use forming the question and note-taking.For the use of social-affective strategy,between FD subjects and FI subjects there are not significant differences.3.After the strategy training,they tend to use different reading strategies in reading,especially they think the sub-strategies are all helpful.The key is how to use them properly.In general,FI subjects are better at using all kinds of strategies than FD subjects,while FD subjects often use the strategies they are familiar with.And they begin to try more strategies after the training.The problem is that they sometimes can't use the strategies reasonably.