An Experimental Study Of Improving Senior 1 Students' English Reading Abilities By Using Reading Strategies

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four basic skills in language learning. Reading, which is the basic way for language learners to get information from the text, takes a very important place among the four skills. Reading is unquestionably important in language teaching and learning, especially in the English teaching. For a lot of English teachers and students, they even hold the idea that "extensive readers embrace the world" in the College Entrance Examination. However,although both the teachersand the students know the importance of reading, the phenomenon of "high input but low output" in English reading teaching can not be ignored. The two main reasons for this are as follows: firstly, the teachers' concept of reading is out-dated and, secondly, the language learners have not mastered effective reading strategies. In order to solve this problem, the present author thinks that students' reading ability can be improved through the training of their reading strategies.There are five chapters in this thesis. Chapter one is an introduction, which introduces the background, the significance (both the theoretical significance and the practical one), the aim and the structure of this thesis and points out the importance of mastering reading strategies to the improvement of students' reading ability and the present teaching of reading. Chapter two is the literature review, which makes a conclusion of the previous research by experts at home and abroad and the practicability of applying correct reading strategies in English teaching to improve the students'reading ability, and meanwhile lays a solid theoretical and practical foundation for the thesis. Chapter three is about the design and method of the study. In this chapter, the hypothesis is made based on the descriptions of the subjects of the study and their choices in the study, that is, this part shows an experimental research between the experimental class and the comparative class. This chapter also introduces the design, the instruments, the steps of this study and the teaching pattern used in the experiment,which is based on the teaching practice, makes a thorough introduction on the teaching content of reading strategies (including fast reading, word guessing, the understanding of syntactic meaning, the structure of the text, etc.) to the students, and then demonstrates how to help the students master reading strategies and improve their reading ability.Chapter four is an analysis of the results of the study. In this part, SPSS 17.0 is used for the analysis of the data of the pre-test and the post-test. Chapter five is a conclusion,which includes the inspirations drawn in the process of the study, the significance of this study to the teaching practice, the limitations of this study and the suggestions for further research.The major findings of this study are that the teaching of reading strategies plays a very important role in improving students' reading ability, and students' mastery of reading strategies can improve their reading ability effectively. As a result, this study can provide some basis and reference for English teachers' teaching of reading in senior high schools and help students' mastery of necessary reading strategies, which can eventually give a solid foundation for improving students reading ability. There is no doubt that there are some limitations in this study, and hopefully, the present author can continue to do research on the connection between reading strategies and the student's grade, thus providing useful suggestions for other teachers in their reading teaching.