A Tentative Study On Reading Strategies Of Higher Vocational Technology College Students

English reading is the main tool of information input for the English language learners and it is one of the important learning skills. So it's significant to conduct research on reading strategy use both for English learning and teaching. The study on reading strategies can be done in the light of learning strategy. Since 1970's, the function of learning strategies to language learning have been concerned by many foreign researchers, for example, Rubin (1975), Naiman (1978), Stern (1975) and so on. Since 1980's some Chinese researchers have also been concerned about the function of learning strategies in the process of English learning, such as Wen Qiufang (1984), Lv Zhongshe (1998), Liu Jinkai (2002) and so on. These researches include some researches on English reading strategies, which generally focus on the training or using of some specific English reading strategies most of whose subjects are involved with the full-time college students. And some investigations about the reading strategy use of HVTC students also mainly concerned themselves about the training of some specific strategies. So this study chooses HVTC students as subjects and aims to investigate the present situation of English reading strategy use in these colleges, the features and some individual differences of English reading strategy use in them. So this thesis is of importance for English reading teaching in HVTC both theoretically and practically.After the literature review of learning strategies and reading strategies, the author adopts O'Malley and Chamot's classification of learning strategies and classifies English reading strategies into three categories: metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective reading strategies. A questionnaire with 36 items of reading strategies based on Oxford's SILL and Sheorey and Mokhtari's SORS is carried out and a test is given to the 211 HVTC subjects. The thesis aims to find out: (1) Are those English reading strategies proposed by our review of reading strategy study common to HVTC students? (2) Are there any differences and what are the differences of the English reading strategies used by high-proficiency group and low-proficiency group, and why do these differences exist? (3) Are there any differences among the English reading strategies used by male and female students, and what the reasons for these differences? After the analysis by SPSS 13.0, the following conclusion is reached: (1) All the English reading strategies in metacognitve, cognitive and social/affective categories are commonly used by the HVTC students, and all the reading strategy use frequencies in the three categories and in the overall use of HVTC students are a little lower than those of the full-time college students; (2) Significant differences exist in overall reading strategy use, metacognitive strategy use and cognitive strategy use, specifically in 18 items,, while social/affective strategy use shows no significant difference; (3) The female group is different from the male group in the overall use of reading strategies, cognitive reading strategies and social/affective reading strategies, specifically in 8 items.Finally, some implications and suggestions are given at the end of the thesis. It suggests that reading strategy instructions should be given in reading class; the teacher should choose appropriate reading materials and encourage students to read more extensively out of class, stimulate the enthusiasm of students, train students to use these reading strategies consciously and so on.