A Study Of EFL Reading Strategies Of Chinese College Students

In China, many studies have been conducted on college students to investigate FL learning strategies. Studies on reading strategies are comparatively fewer. Specific studies on three-year college students' reading strategies are even fewer. This study investigated the situation of three-year college students' use of reading strategies in the expectation of finding out if there is any significant difference in reading strategy use between good readers and poor readers, male students and female students, liberal arts students and science students, if there is any significant correlation between reading strategies and reading performance and, if reading strategies can predict reading performance.One hundred and twenty-seven three-year college students from Linyi Normal University participated in this research. Based on Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) of Oxford (1990), a reading strategy questionnaire was administered, together with a semi-structured interview, to investigate students' use of reading strategies. One reading proficiency test quoted from 2002 SDUET was adopted to test students' reading proficiency. Data were processed with SPSS 11.0 statistical analysis system. Descriptive statistics was conducted to study the general situation of students' use of reading strategies. Independent-sample T-tests were applied to find out differences in strategy use between good and poor readers, the males and females, students of liberal arts and science. Pearson product moment correlations were used to determine the strength of relationship between reading strategies and reading proficiency. Multiple regression analysis was further applied to look into the predictive power of reading strategies on reading performance.Results of the study reveal that three-year college students use reading strategies at medium level. Significant differences in the use reading strategies are found between good readers and poor readers. Female students use reading strategies more often than male students. Specialty has no effect on the use of reading strategies. Reading strategies are significantly correlated with reading proficiency and cognitive reading strategy has direct predictive power on reading performance. Based on these findings, implications on integrating reading strategy training into FL reading instruction have been discussed.