A Study Of English Foreign Language Reading Strategies Of Senior High School Students

One of the objectives in the Curriculum Standards of high school English is to enable students to cultivate effective learning strategies.Reading strategies is an indispensable part in learning strategies.Reading strategies can enhance students’ reading abilities.Previous studies abroad on reading strategies show that it can be divided into meta-cognitive strategies,cognitive strategies and social-affective strategies.Students are taken as the research subjects in this thesis,learning the characteristics and the existing problems of the senior high students in the process of applying reading strategies in order to further explore pedagogical implications of optimizing reading strategies instruction.As a school-based research,this thesis takes Senior Grade Two students in Weinan Gaoxin Middle school as the research subjects and adopts schema theory and discourse analysis as the theoretical basis.A total of 153 students respond to the questionnaires and 6 students at random are interviewed to collect the research data.Then the data is computed and analyzed with SPSS 20.0 to answer the following questions: 1)what is the distribution of reading strategies employed by senior high students? 2)what are the students’ perceptions towards reading strategies in senior high school?The results show that the overall frequency of reading strategies that students use is “sometimes used”.Among these three kinds of strategies,cognitive strategies are most often used by students,followed by social-affective strategy and the least preferred category is meta-cognitive strategies.What’s more,senior high students have a weak awareness of strategy application and their cognition of reading strategies is only on the level of “know and understand” rather than apply it into practice actively.Meanwhile,students’ reading strategies choice and application is toa large extent influenced by teachers’ daily reading instruction.On this basis,this thesis presents some pedagogical implications for the senior high English reading instruction and students to improve students’ reading strategies application and lay the foundation for lifelong learning.