An Exploratory Study On The Strategies Employed By Chinese University Students In The Process Of Fast Reading Comprehension

Reading plays a very important part in language learning. Reading strategies refer to strategies used by language learners to improve their reading comprehension. In recent years, many researches have been done in the field of reading strategies. It is believed that the application of reading strategies impacts the reading efficiency. The present study intends to investigate reading strategies employed by the non-English major college students. Six fast reading strategies are illustrated in the thesis. The author attempts to find out the differences in reading strategies among students with various English levels after they have finished their required language training. The study aims to answer these questions:a) Which fast reading strategies are frequently employed by Chinese University students;b) To what extent are their reading strategies related to their reading proficiency.The study was carried out in Shanghai Jiao Tong University. A quantitative research is employed to obtain data to find out the use of reading strategies by third-year non-English majors and the relationship between reading strategies and reading proficiency. Besides numerical data, two qualitative researches are also adopted to supply detailed description of the application of reading strategies by successful and unsuccessful readers, with the purpose of further testing the correlation between reading strategies and reading proficiency. Computer program SPSS was utilized to investigate if there were significant difference between students who apply reading strategies and those often do not. The major findings of the present study are: the application of certain fast reading strategies can improve students'performance on some reading comprehension questions; some strategies are highly correlated with...