Improving Students' English Reading Comprehension Through Reading Strategies Training In Senior Middle School

As is known to all that reading is very important for almost all the people, especially for the senior students. It is by far the most important of the four skills. But unfortunately the scores of English reading comprehension are not satisfactory among the NMET English test .The phenomenon of "more input and less output" is still common in English reading teaching. There are two reasons for this. One is related to the reading concept which is unilateral and unrealistic, the other is because learners can not grasp and use reading strategy properly. This thesis intends to make an attempted study of the English reading strategy and strategy training in senior high schools in order to find whether my students' reading comprehension also can be improved efficiently when they get trained in reading strategy.In the present study, about 100 Senior One students were chosen as the subjects from class 1& 2 in the Senior Middle School of Erdos Educational College. Class1 is the controlled class; Class 2 is the experimental class. Based on the results of the questionnaire investigation on the students' reading strategy, the reading strategy training was performed in experimental class for 14 weeks from April 2008 to July 2008, while in the controlled class, the conventional reading teaching method (grammar-translation method) was conducted. The data were collected from the students' questionnaire investigation on reading strategy, pre-test and post-test in reading. And all the data were calculated by SPSS (Statistical Program for Social Science) 11.0. The statistic results indicate that the students can obtain enough effective reading strategies after reading strategy training, and that effective reading strategies can help students improve their reading comprehension. The statistic results show that the students' reading performance and their self-study ability in English reading after the strategy training have been improved markedly than those of the students in controlled class.The results of this study may provide first-hand information on English reading teaching for senior English teachers. In this way they can help the students to find their shortcomings and adjust their reading strategies.