An Investigation On English Reading Strategies Employed By Senior High School Students

Reading acts an important part in English learning. It is not only one of the most important ways to absorb the language materials and obtain the language knowledge as well as to gain the important information for the readers but also an important means to obtain language input. Developing students’ learning strategy is one of the objectives of the new English curriculum standard(2011), the appropriate use of learning strategies can improve the students’ learning ability. Reading strategy is a kind of the learning strategies, so we can know the importance of reading strategy in reading due to learning strategy’s importance in study. However, senior high school students are generally weak in English reading. So the purpose of the research is to understand the overall English reading strategy employment by the senior high school students in the process of reading English materials, including finding out whether the students use strategy, use what strategies and the difference of using strategy. By doing so, it can help English teacher improve teaching and students’ reading ability.The researcher intended to investigate students’ reading strategy employment in Hangzhou No. 14 Senior High School for the purpose of preparing a plan for developing students’ learning strategy in English reading. Questionnaires were used as the main instrument to collect data at the first stage in which 46 participants were involved in the investigation. In terms of knowing more about students’ reading strategy employment, 10 participants were interviewed respectively. The researcher use percentage to calculate the use condition of each strategy. SPSS 20.0 was adopted to analyze and interpret strategy use by the participants. Descriptive statistics was used to compare the degree to which strategies were reported to be used frequently or infrequently by students in general. The results reveal that the students can use strategies in reading, but the frequency of the participants’ overall reading strategy employment falls into the moderate use, which means the participants cannot flexibly apply reading strategies in assisting their reading. In terms of three steps of reading, As for frequency of strategy use for the three stages of reading, the students use reading strategies “While-Reading” more frequently than they do “Before-Reading” and “After-Reading”. The students with high English proficiency are better at using reading strategies than those with low English proficiency. Differences in individual strategy use are shown among students. The researcher proposes suggestions in terms of improving English reading teaching and learning based upon the research findings.