| In recent years, research in second language reading has been transferred from the focus on learners'strategy use to focus on the role of metacognition in reading comprehension. In this field, researchers are examining readers' awareness of strategies during the reading process - their metacognitive awareness. Studies on readers'metacognitive awareness provide teachers and researchers a better understanding of readers'comprehension process, including identifying the strategies they use and how and under what conditions they use those strategies. Despite a vast body of research in this area abroad, there are only a few investigations on metacognitive awareness of Chinese English readers. Also, in China, quite few studies conducted on readers'metacognitive awareness of reading strategies.Therefore, the present study aims to investigate non-English majors'metacognitive awareness about the use of reading strategies when reading academic materials. This research attempts to fulfill the following four tasks: to identify the type and frequency of perceived use of reading strategies students apply in reading tasks, to examine whether gender and proficiency will affect students'metacognitive awareness about reading strategies, and to discover the internal relationship between perceived reading strategies use and English proficiency. 230 second-year non-English major students in JiangXi Normal University participated in the investigation. They were asked to report the reading strategies they used and English proficiency by completing a questionnaire containing Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) designed by Mokhtari and Sheorey (2002). Then all the data were inputted into the computer and analyzed by SPSS 17.0. Descriptive and independent sample t-test and correlational analysis have been carried out.The main findings are as follows: First, the participants show a medium awareness of the reading strategies. Second, among the three broad categories of reading strategies, students display a clear preference for Problem Solving Strategies, followed by Global Reading Strategies and Support Reading Strategies. Third, females show slight higher awareness in overall strategy use, but significant greater awareness only in four individual strategies and one Global Reading Strategy category than males. Fourth, the high-English-proficiency students show higher reported usage for overall reading strategies and all the three sub-categories than low-English-proficiency students. Finally, the results indicate there is a significant correlation between students' reported strategy use and their English proficiency.In the light of the above findings, the following suggestions might provide teachers and educators with pedagogical implications for helping readers increase their awareness and use of reading strategies. First, increasing students'metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and improve their ability of strategy use play a vital role in helping students become competent readers. In view of this, L2 teachers in classroom should integrate reading strategy training into reading instructions and guide them to use different strategies in real reading situation. Second, changing teachers and learners'traditional roles played in teaching and learning is helpful to cultivate independent learners, to develop active and efficient readers. Furthermore, it is important for teachers to recognize individual differences like gender and proficiency differences so as to treat different students differently. Fourthly, based on the close correlation between strategy use and English proficiency, teachers should help their students improve language proficiency by encouraging them to make frequent use of effective strategies, which in turn would make students use these strategies more frequently. In all, increasing students'awareness of strategies and frequency of actual usage of reading strategies are the prerequisites of higher reading performance and language proficiency. |
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