Experimental Research On Training Junior High School Students’ English Reading Strategies

Reading is one of the most important ways of obtaining information, learningknowledge of language and culture, getting language input as well. Reading is anindispensable part to the process of learning English, but also a difficulty in languageteaching. During the process of reading, students fail to read efficiently due to avariety of barriers, including vocabulary, grammar, culture background, andpsychological barriers. At the same time, language-based and grammar-orientedtraditional teaching model can’t help students improve their reading abilities, andeven worse, students gradually lose the interest in English reading. EnglishCurriculum Standard (2011) requires teachers to do the research on reading strategies,and encourages students, with the help of teachers, to discover the language rules,master the language skills, adjust the learning attitudes, form the efficient learningstrategies, and improve self-study abilities through experience, practice, participation,discovery, and cooperation. Therefore, the author reflects on the teaching of Englishreading strategies in junior school, and decides to do the research on teaching readingstrategies.This study intends to investigate the training of junior school students’ readingstrategies, which is to help develop students’ reading abilities, improve their use ofreading strategies and English language proficiency. Those students in Junior Three inShijiazhuang Foreign Language School are chosen as experimental subjects, whichare made up of the experimental class and the control class. In the experimental class,students were taught specific reading strategies and trained how to apply the readingstrategies inside and outside classroom. While in the control class, students didn’t getany instruction of reading strategies, and traditional teaching methods were used.During the research, questionnaire, test and interview are adopted to collect the data.The scores of pre-test and post-test, and the results of questionnaire were analyzed bySPSS.Comparison of scores in the experimental class and the control class shows thattraining teaching English reading strategies plays a significant role in developing students’ reading abilities and their English language proficiency. The results ofquestionnaire and interview indicate that training reading strategies does improvestudents’ use of reading strategies. All of the results have proved that training readingstrategies is feasible and effective. As a result, it is quite necessary for Englishteachers to change their traditional teaching methods and to train and cultivate theirstudents to use these strategies consciously in English reading. As for students, it is agood idea to establish their own reading records to monitor their reading process,which helps to develop the reading ability.