An Empirical Study Of Explicit Strategy Training And Efficient Reading

Due to the importance of reading among the basic foreign language skills, how to improve students' English reading proficiency has long been a common concern of researchers and English teachers. In the early times, great attention had been paid to the study of various teaching methodologies in order to find the most effective one. However, there seemed to be no way out. For one thing, none of the methodologies can be said to be perfect. For another, there is no perfect methodology to everyone, if students are really treated as individuals. It was not until the 1970s that researchers on learning strategies began to throw new light on independent reader training. For the first time, it was widely acknowledged that training students how to read was even more important.Strategy interventionist studies have been undertaken and researched for some time in first and second language fields, especially with regard to reading strategies (e.g.; Ryan, 1981; Duffy, 1983; Pressley and Levin, 1983; Brown, 1984; Garner, 1987,1990; Oxford, 1990; Pearson and Fielding, 1991; Dadour and Robbins, 1996). Although some researches have recently been done on language learning strategies in China, most of them focus on the identification, description and classification of useful learning strategies or the relationship between learning strategies and learning performance, and the subjects of these researches are too often college English majors instead of non-English majors. There are a few empirical and interventionist studies on the effectiveness of explicit strategy training on reading comprehension. Furthermore, in view of the controversy over the necessity and feasibility of strategies training among some English teachers in China and the fact that strategies training are far from popular in our English teaching, the purpose of the present study is to find out the contribution that explicit strategy training might offer English learners with a particular focus on reading comprehension on empirical grounds. So the following questions are developed to clarify the purpose of the study.1. Does explicit strategy training improve the reading comprehension ability of EFL adult learners? If so, which reading proficiency group (high, intermediate,...