High School Students’ Inferencing Strategy Use In English Reading Tasks

As a main source of Chinese students’ language input,English reading plays a very important role in high school students’ English learning.Many scholars’ previous studies have shown that the use of inferencing strategies has a positive impact on the improvement of students’ English reading ability.In order to study the current situation of high school students’ inferencing strategy use in English reading tasks,and compare the similarities and differences in the use of strategies between the successful and less successful students,this research selected six high school students as research participants.According to their language proficiency levels,three of them were classified as successful English learners whilst the other three were defined as less successful English learners.Think-aloud protocols and interviews were employed as research tools to collect data.All participants need to complete two identical reading tasks,and when doing the tasks,they were required to verbalize their thinking processes.After that,the researcher interviewed six students respectively.Through in-depth analysis and comparison of data,it is found that there are both similarities and differences in the use of inferencing strategies between the successful and the less successful students.The similarities are that both successful and less successful students used some strategies such as repetition,locating specific information,and using main idea to infer meaning,whilst the differences are mainly reflected in context selection,logic examination of inferences,dependence on L1,and so on.The main reasons accounting for the differences are students’ metacognition and motivation,vocabulary knowledge,reading experience,and strategy knowledge and awareness.Finally,based on the results of the study,some suggestions for high school English reading teaching were put forward.