An Investigation Of Chinese Rural Junior High School Students' English Reading Strategies

As a basic skill and main channel of information input, English reading plays a major role in FLT. Many researches have been done on reading strategies, but most subjects of these researches are taken from colleges and senior high schools. Scant researches collected data from rural junior high school students, who are particular intelligently and physiologically. At their age and under their disadvantaged learning circumstances, English reading strategies are very important in their English reading. To provide fresh data for research in this field and to rural junior high school English teachers, and to help students in rural areas to learn English better, the present investigation is conducted in three rural junior high schools of Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province.In this quantitative and qualitative study, a questionnaire, an interview and a diary study are conducted to investigate English reading strategies used by rural junior high school students in order to find out the frequency pattern of reading strategy use in rural high schools; the frequency pattern of reading strategy use of good English readers in rural junior high schools; and the differences of strategy use between good and poor English readers.The investigation draws the following conclusions:1. Generally speaking, students do not use reading strategies frequently. The frequency of students'using metacognitive strategies is almost the same as cognitive strategies on the whole. The most frequently used reading strategies are metacognitive strategies, followed by cognitive strategies and resource management strategies. The least often used strategies are communicative strategies.2. Good student readers use reading strategies frequently, but do not use them at the same level. The most frequently used reading strategies are metacognitive strategies, followed by communicative strategies and cognitive strategies. The infrequently used strategies are resource management strategies. 3. Good readers use English reading strategies more frequently than poor readers.