Influence Of Non-english Majors’ Reading Styles On Their Reading Comprehension Level

Reading is a process of obtaining information from the visual material. As a receptive skill, reading plays an important role in the students’ language learning and acquisition. With the popularization of English learning in China, passing CET-4 has become the minimum standard that the common non-English majors should reach, and reading always accounts for a large proportion in English testing. However, reading comprehension is a complex cognitive and psychological process, which is not only influenced by the readers’ vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, but also by their knowledge of the world, psychological activities, reading styles and other factors. Therefore, how to improve the students’ ability of reading comprehension is an issue which the English teachers have been exploring all the time. In this study the author focuses on the influence of non-English majors’ reading styles on their reading comprehension level, aiming to help the non-English majors make reasonable judgment of their reading styles, find the effective reading style and finally improve their reading level through the teacher’s proper strategic guidance.Both qualitative and quantitative research methods have been used in this thesis. First of all, the reading styles have been divided into analytic style, global style and synthetic style according to Kirby’s theory of reading(1988). Then, 153 freshmen from Sichuan Normal University Chengdu College have been tested about their reading styles and reading comprehension level: the reading comprehension parts from CET-4 have been used to test the students’ reading ability, and the questionnaire and the interview to investigate their reading styles; SPSS19.0 has been adopted to present a quantitative analysis of the obtained data. The results of the test show that: 1) the analytic style is the most commonly used by the non-English majors in reading comprehension, followed by the global style, and the synthetic reading style, which is the least popular; 2) the students’ reading styles and their reading comprehension level are related. The high level group prefers synthetic style, while the low level group tends to use analytic and global styles; 3) the readers with different reading styles have significant differences in answering the detailed questions and the general questions, and the synthetic readers behave the best in the two kinds of questions.Based on the findings above, the author has put forward some corresponding strategies for developing the students’ synthetic style: 1) helping the students to be aware of their reading styles so that they could be self-regulated, and encouraging the analytic readers to do more exercise about conclusion and summary, the global readers to practice more about grasping the details of material; 2) teaching the students in accordance with their aptitude in class, namely adopting compensatory teaching for students with different styles according to the discourse type of the reading material; 3) emphasizing the improvement of students’ basic knowledge, including lexical knowledge and background knowledge; 4) developing the students’ reading style through the sense group reading method, making global inference, making lexical inference and other specific reading strategies. Hopefully, the fruit of this study can be offered as some reference to the English teachers.