A Comparative Study On Reading Strategies Between English Majors And Non-English Majors

Since the 1970s, researchers and theorists in second language education have shifted their attention from examining the methods of teaching to investigating the process of learning. The research focus has shifted to the learners and how to improve their learning.As for reading strategies, many ESL researchers have also begun to recognize the importance of the strategy used by ESL students in reading. But a lot of students' ability of understanding the discourse and summarizing the information is far from satisfactory and the effectiveness of reading and the overall reading ability is low. The main reason lies in the influences of traditional methodology of foreign language teaching (grammar translation) which makes the students in a passive position.This research chooses two comparative groups: English majors and Non-English majors. We must admit for these two comparative groups there exist some differences in the degree of studying. The main reasons are the educational investment, class hour, the time for studying which students spend and so on To solve this question we choose two sets of reading comprehension tests TEM4 and CET4 as references respectively. But for language learning, there is no majors' difference. The main purposes is to master the ways and skills of studying and promote language learning. The teaching syllabus consider reading strategies as one of the aims of reading course which proves the meaning of the study. This study directly addresses the questions as follows:1. What is the relationship between reading strategies and the reading proficiency levels of two comparative groups: Non-English majors and English majors respectively? What are the differences and similarities between English majors and Non-English majors in this aspect?2. For each type of reading strategy, is there any significant difference in their use of each type of reading strategy?The research instruments are composed of one questionnaire concerning learning strategies in reading, two reading proficiency tests CET-4 and TEM-4 of 2007 for Non- English majors and English majors. The questionnaire is based on the classification of Chamot and O'Malley's language learning strategies, other researchers' classification of reading strategies, domestic studies, and consideration of the reading teaching situations in the college, the author classified the reading strategies into three categories. There are 49 items in the questionnaire. 58 English majors and 150 Non-English majors in the second-year of Yanbian University participated in this research. The data got from these experiments were examined through the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS 14.0) statistical analysis system. Procedures as descriptive statistics, Pearson product-moment correlation and t-test for independent samples have been adopted. The results got from the research are listed as follows:1. Scores of the reading comprehension tests in CET4 and TEM4 are substantially and positively correlated with scores of three types of reading strategies: metacognitive, cognitive and social-affective for both English majors and Non-English majors, just as we expected. The correlation among the three types of reading strategies for both English majors and Non-English majors can also be observed clearly.2. English majors and Non-English majors do show significant difference in their use of metacognitive strategy, cognitive strategy and social-affective strategy in reading. Compared with Non-English majors, English majors show highest significant difference in their use of the social-affective strategies.Based on these findings, the implications on reading strategy instructions have been discussed and some suggestions on how to give effective language learning to Chinese English learners have been provided. Owing to the validity of the self-designed questionnaire and the complexity of the study of learners, at the final part of the thesis some remaining research problems as well as directions for future research have been pointed out.Hope that the study can speed the progress of English majors and Non-English majors together under the context of China foreign language teaching and learning; especially hope that the effective reading strategies can give a hand to the reading comprehension of non-effective readers.