The Effect Of Topic Familiarity On The Choice Of Reading Strategies By The English Learners Of Vocational School

The schema is called existed knowledge or background knowledge, which refers to thegeneral knowledge of the world stored in the human mind. The schema theory is a theory onreading comprehension and text interpretation under the help of schema knowledge. Readingability is determined by two main schemas, one is linguistic schema and the other is contentschema. The original content schema determines the degree of topic familiarity of a text.English reading strategy is regarded as one of the main determinants in improving Englishreading ability. It plays an important role in the whole reading process. Many scholars haveresearched its influence on the outcomes of English reading and have showed that it is one ofthe main variables affecting students’ reading achievements. The author aims to find whetherthe content schema influence the choice of readers’ strategies or not. On the basis of theprecious studies, this paper investigates the effect of the topic familiarity on the L2learners’employment of macro and micro reading strategies. The characters of the non-English majorstudents from HighVocationalTechnologyCollege in employing reading strategies and theright reading strategies introduced in our English class are also discussed in this paper. Thestudy mainly focuses on the following questions.1. Does the degree of the topic familiarity of reading texts affect L2readers’ macro andmicro strategies in dealing with discourse?2. How does the topic familiarity influence the choice of the macro or micro strategies?3. Do different reading strategies produce different reading achievements, and how do they interact?4. What is the overall picture of employment of reading strategies among highvocational-technology college students?The instruments of reading test, questionnaire and think aloud protocol are used in thisquantitative study. The author didn’t limit the reading passages in some kind of test. Thematerials used in this experiment are from text book, CET-4and PETS, whose purpose istrying to cover a wide range of topic and fitting for the students of high vocational technologycolleges, such as on culture, science, living，entertainment and society. The five passages areclosely similar in length and type.94subjects took part in the study. In the first stage, theywere asked to do the reading comprehension test including five passages and a questionnaire.To reduce the influence of language proficiency on the reading strategies,43medium studentsamong the previous subjects were selected to join in the experiment of think aloud protocol.The second stage of the study was carried out a month later, and the43subjects were asked toread two passages again, which were selected from the previous materials and havesignificant difference. While they were reading, they must manage to record all thinking thatappeared in their mind. Finally,86valid think aloud protocol records were collected.The reading strategies in the records were coded and classified, and the data receivedare analyzed with independent samples T-test and correlation analysis using StatisticalPackage for the Social Sciences (SPSS17.0).The following are the major findings of thestudy.1. When reading the passages with different topic familiarity, macro and microstrategies used by the subjects are significantly different, while the sum of reading strategiesis not obviously different.2. Readers tend to employ macro strategies when reading high degree of familiarity, andthey tend to use micro strategies when reading low degree of familiarity.3. The topic familiarity is positively correlated with the readers’ achievement and thefrequency of macro strategies, while negatively correlated with the frequency of microstrategies. Scores of the readers is positively correlated with the frequency of macro strategies,while it has no correlation with the frequency of micro strategies. 4. Generally speaking，the strategies of interpretation, synthesis and guessing are usedin high frequency while prediction, question and comment are used in low frequency. Amongthe macro strategies that have significant influence on the reading performance, thesub-strategy of interpretation is the most frequently used one, synthesis is the second, andquestion is the most infrequently used sub-strategy.According to these results of the research, some countermeasures to improve readingachievement of students in high vocational and technological college with appropriate Englishreading strategy instruction are put forward in this paper.