A Study On Teaching English Reading Strategies To Grade Eight

Reading is one of the four basic skills for language learning.Reading is also a key factor indicating the students' learning ability.After the reform of the English Curriculum in junior middle schools,it becomes more challenging for the students to meet the new English standard.Besides the reading materials in the textbook,the students are required to learn more about the historical and cultural backgrounds related to these materials.According to the requirements,in three years the junior middle school students should master about 2000 words,fully understand the reading materials in the textbooks and their related background knowledge,and possess certain reading strategies such as predicting,scanning and skimming.However,in some middle schools especially those in the countryside,some students fail to meet the requirements of reading habits and strategies,and they think “reading is identical to translation”,while the teachers are usually confined to teaching words.With the requirements of the students' reading level becoming higher and higher,Grade Eight becomes the most crucial period for the junior middle school students.Therefore,the English teachers in Grade Eight urgently need to improve their reading teaching methods and constantly improve the students' reading interest and competence.In view of this,the present thesis takes Yongning Middle School of Wenjiang District in Chengdu City,Sichuan Province,as a case to study teaching English reading strategies to Grade Eight students.The thesis attempts to answer the two major questions as follows:1.How to teach English reading strategies to the students of Grade Eight?2.In what degree does reading strategy teaching exert influence upon reading competence of the students of Grade Eight at different levels?The subjects of the study are the students of Grade Eight in Yongning Middle School.They are 73 students from two classes: Experimental Class and Control Class.In hope of figuring out the cognitive and meta-cognitive problems of the students,the author of the thesis analyzes the mistakes the students made and conducts the questionnaire survey.Over the following four months,the author applies reading strategies cultivation for Experimental Class,including predicting,skimming,scanning,guessing and some meta-cognitive strategies like self-management.Meanwhile,the students need to adjust the reading strategies properly when they do different reading exercises according to different requirements and materials.As a result,the students can improve their reading competence by applying the reading strategies and meta-cognitive strategies.In addition,in order to test the effectiveness of reading strategies training and the impact of reading strategies training on the students at different levels,the author divides each class into three groups: High-level Group(>20 points),Middle-level Group(10-20 points)and Low-level Group(<10 points).At the same time,the author collects the monthly test scores of the two classes for four months,then analyzes the data and compares the data through SPSS analysis.The author of this thesis found that the cultivation of reading strategies improves some students' reading competence in cognitive and meta-cognitive aspects,and that the effect is especially obvious for students of middle level.Finally,the author concludes the study of the thesis,puts forward some suggestions for teaching English reading strategies to Grade Eight,and analyzes the limitations of this study.