A Survey On The Application Of English Reading Strategies For Non-English Majors

As one of the important language skills and an important component whichwill exert great influence over students’ overall achievement in all kinds ofEnglish tests, reading has been more and more emphasized in college Englishteaching. However, the results of reading teaching have not been ideal enough. Itis beyond doubt that the factors leading to college students’ poor readingproficiency are various, but students’ improper application of reading strategieshas been an important reason. So far, lots of researchers both at home and abroadhave made studies on the subjects’ use of reading strategies from differentperspectives. However, the studies which take non-English majors in newuniversities as study subjects are relatively few. The author took this peculiargroup of students as her study subjects, hoping that the findings of the studywould provide pedagogical implications for the reading teaching in the newuniversities.The present study aimed to find out the general situation of the subjects’application of reading strategies and whether there existed a correlation betweenthe subjects’ application of reading strategies and their reading proficiency. It wasfurther carried out to explore the differences between the subjects with differentreading proficiency and different genders in their utility of reading strategies.128non-English students from Long Dong University in Gansu Province were chosenas the study subjects and a reading test, a questionnaire and an interview wereadopted as the author’s study instruments. The data obtained were possessed bythe means of SPSS17.0.The present study achieved the following findings:1) The subjects applied reading strategies at a medium frequency on the whole.2) There existed asignificant positive correlation between the subjects’ application of meta-cognitiveand cognitive strategies and their reading proficiency while there wasn’t asignificant relationship between their application of social/affective readingstrategies and their reading proficiency. Besides, the three strategies inmeta-cognitive strategies,“self-evaluation”,“self-management” and “selectiveattention” and the four strategies in cognitive strategies,“deduction”,“association”“inference”“imagery” have a strong correlation with readingproficiency.3) Comparatively speaking, the subjects with high readingproficiency used all the three reading strategies more frequently and flexibly thanthose with low reading proficiency. Through deeper exploration, the studyachieved11concrete reading strategies that can make significant difference tonon-English majors’ reading levels.4) There didn’t exist significant differencesbetween different genders in their application of reading strategies, althoughfemale and male readers actually showed different characteristics in theirutilization of reading strategies.