The Training Of English Reading Strategies In Wuhai NO.6Senior High School

Reading is a primary and significant skill for English as foreign language students. In senior high school, improving students’ reading ability is one of major achievements in English teaching. However, a lot of high school students have not obviously improved in English reading when they have studied for three years at school. Even there are quantities of students who become less interested in English learning or hate learning English. So there are many challenges for English teachers in English reading teaching, and one of them is quite a few students are not positive with the text in a useful way and much of their reading is not influent. Though it takes them much time to learn English, many students don’t obtain obvious improvements in English, especially in reading. So some cautious teachers and researchers start to pay more attention to the solution to the problem.Second language research interest has transformed from how to teach to how to learn since the1970s,. Researchers begin to focus on learning process. They make an attempt to find out a solution to the problem which can solve the difficulty in English reading by studying reading strategies use and training.The literature of reading theories and reading models from the view of cognitive and psycholinguistics psychology were reviewed in the paper. This thesis also presented the literature of the previous research on reading strategies. An one-term experiment, which was based on these theory frames, was carried out so as to prove the effectiveness of strategy training in English reading. In the experiment, the author wants to answer the following two questions:1) Is there any difference between efficient and non-efficient readers in strategy use in English reading?2) Can reading ability be improved by the means of strategy training?Two procedures were included in the experiment.In the first procedure, I used a questionnaire so as to work out the difference between e non-fficient and efficient readers in strategy use in English reading. In the second and most important procedure, I led the students to do English reading by teaching them strategies in English classes at our school. Students who were in two classes participate in the experiment. One class is experimental class, which I taught and trained them some necessary reading strategies in English reading. The other one is control class that didn’t. receive any reading strategy training during the term.(Considering that the students will take the NCET in their Grade Three and the experiment didn’t have an effect on their study, I chose the students who were in Grade One.).After the experiment, the author analysed the results of the pre-test and post-test by the two groups. It is easy to find that teachers can teach and train students English reading strategies on purpose to improve their reading competence.This thesis consists of four sections.The first section is the introduction of literature review. It mainly introduces the reading, the definitions of reading strategies and the classifications of reading strategies. And it also introduces the traditional views on reading comprehension and the cognitive views in the field of reading. In this part, some reading theories are also introduced: the top-down approach; the bottom-up approach; the interactive approach and the schema theory.The second section is about the research methodology. This is an experimental research.100Senior1students in Wu Hai No.6Senior High School were chosen as the subjects for research. The results show that a lower percentage of students use reading strategies in reading activities. So students’ reading ability is not as good as expected. The results also show that reading strategies are almost neglected in English teaching.In the third section, the research shows that there are some problems in reading comprehension, which are mainly in two aspects: the problems reflected in English teaching and the problems reflected in students’ learning, In English teaching, there remain some problems: teaching with the old ideas; lack of training of the reading skills; lack of guidance of reading after class. And in students’ learning, there are also some problems remained. For example, lacking of enough reading strategies; lacking of good reading habits; lacking of the background information; lacking of interest.In the fourth section, some possible effective ways are introduced. For example, cultivating students’ reading skills; identifying the types or the structures of the articles; analyzing the long sentences; accumulating and applying synthetical knowledge; recognizing word skills; and identifying the topic sentence. In addition, in the English teaching, we should cultivate the interest of reading and accumulate background information by encouraging students to do more practice.To sum up, lack of reading strategies is one of the main factors which lead to the failure of the reading comprehension. Both the teachers and the students should stress the importance of English reading and should pay attention to reading strategies in order to improve the level of reading comprehension.