Empirical Studies Of College Language Learners' In-class And After-class Reading Strategy Training

The study of reading strategies not only can reveal the process of readers' interactions with reading material, but also demonstrate how the use of strategies is related to the effective reading. More and more attention has been drawn to the reading strategy training in recent years. Under the theoretical framework of the learning strategy, the researches on reading strategy training have got fruitful results, but the results of the effectiveness and appropriateness of the reading strategy training for Chinese EFL learners are still varied. Besides, many previous studies focused on in-class training while the after-class guidance was neglected. So based on Cohen's strategy training theory and David Little's learner autonomy theory, the present study designed a 16-week training experiment to verify the effectiveness of both in-class and after-class reading strategy training on learners'reading proficiency.Combining qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis, this paper attempts to study the following research questions:(1) what is the overall situation of reading strategy use and reading comprehension ability of the subjects? (2) Through the in-class reading strategy training, what kind of reading strategies can be dramatically improved, and to what extent? (3) Can after-class guidance be used to facilitate the in-class training and train the learner autonomy? Two hypotheses were formed based on the previous studies:(1) reading strategy training can greatly improve the learners' reading proficiency; (2) the after-class guidance can be used to arouse the learners' metacognitive awareness. The major goal of this thesis is to find out whether the after-class training can promote the in-class training and learner autonomy.This paper adopts the instruments of questionnaire, interview, reading comprehension test, the learner profiles and diaries as well as reading strategy training experiment. There are 160 subjects participating in the training experiment, which are all non-English major sophomores in Zhengzhou University. Through SPSS 11.5, the pretest and posttest were analyzed by means of Independent-Samples T Test and Paired-Samples T Test. The data of the two questionnaires were compared to reveal the change of the subjects'reading strategy use after training. Finally, the conclusions were achieved:firstly, the reading strategy training can significantly improve the learners'reading proficiency; secondly, the after-class guidance can promote the in-class training while at the same time helps to train autonomous readers.The significance lies in the following aspects:(1) It objectively reveals the real situation of the reading strategies used by the subjects, providing meaningful data to make the further research for strategy-based reading; (2) the results of the study will arouse teachers'awareness to take actions to conduct a systematical training on reading strategies; (3) the analysis of this research topic will help the teachers better understand the correlation between in-class and after-class training; (4) the paper is an attempt to throw light on senior-level classroom reading strategy training in China.