An Experimental Research Into The Effect Of Strategy Reading Instruction Of College English

By drawing on the discipline of Linguistics, Foreign Language Teaching Methodology, Second Language Acquisition, Educational Statistics, and Cognitive Psychology, this thesis has explored and experimentally confirmed the effect of strategy reading instruction of College English, supported by the results of questionnaire survey as well.The thesis consists of six chapters and five appendixes of data. The first chapter introduces the motivations for this research, the methodology intended and the structure of the dissertation. The second chapter explores the natures of reading, namely, reading as a cognitive process; reading as a constructive process; reading as an interactive process; reading as a social process ,and reading as a strategic process. The author also reviews the different definitions on reading proficiency and offers her critical views on the given definitions. She then redefines the term of reading proficiency in accordance with her own understanding and insights into the term. The third chapter is about the theoretical foundation of EFL reading instruction. In the first section of Chapter 3, the strong points and weaknesses about the bottom-up model, top-down model and even the interactive model are presented and objectively analyzed. In the second half of the third chapter the author concentrates on the schema theory, schema reading model, as well as one widely accepted language teaching approach, CLT, and one currently popular language learning theory, Cooperative Learning.After theoretical preparations and critical analyses, an ACTIVB framework is proposed based on her strategy reading instruction practices for many years. She thinks that College English reading class can be organized by six major strategies: Activate prior knowledge, Cultivate vocabulary, Teach for comprehension, Increase reading rate, Verify strategies, and Build motivation, putting the first capitalized letters together ACTIVB. At pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading stages, different classroom activities requiredfor various reading strategies are implemented. In this case, two factors contribute to the promotion of the student's reading proficiency, one is the combination of linguistic knowledge inherent in the text with prior knowledge beyond it; the other remains the interaction between a reader and a text through constant strategy-application, strategy-testing, and strategy-adjustment as the contents change. The constant strategy-adjustment, in nature, as an interaction between the reader and the text, can deepen the comprehension of the materials, which subconsciously trains their good reading habits simultaneously.The fifth chapter, as a body of the dissertation together with Chapter 4, is the presentation about the experimental results and questionnaire survey results conducted in Wuhan University of Technology. The author conducted an experiment lasting for 12 weeks from Oct. 2004 to Dec.2004 with R&E 0401 and E0402 two natural classes as two groups, an experimental group and a control group. The results eventually confirm the effect of strategy reading instruction approach with statistically significant difference. In order to further proof the effect of the approach, a questionnaire was designed and administered among the 66 subjects. The results of the questionnaire reveal that the percentage of acceptance and approval of the approach is much higher than that of the disapproval.Chapter six is conclusion. The author finally asserts that compared with the traditional approach, the strategy reading instruction approach is more effective to facilitate the students' reading proficiency. The pedagogic approach is of value in helping overcome the commonly existing time-consuming but low efficient EFL reading teaching situation in China.