A Study On Reading Strategies Of English High-Achievers In Senior High Schools

English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2017)points out that effective utilization of strategies will undoubtedly make learning of much effect and of great efficiency;besides,employing learning strategies contributes to positive transfer which will be beneficial to students’ lifelong learning.Previous researches,however,have illustrated that many students have been ill-equipped to manipulate reading strategies including meta-cognitive strategies,cognitive strategies and socio-affective strategies during reading process.Hence,this study aims to provide students and teachers with more valuable suggestions to improve reading comprehension through explicating which reading strategies and how the reading strategies employed by English high-achievers and the relationship between the utilization of reading strategies and examination results.The study is conducted to answer the following research questions: 1.What reading habits do English high-achievers have? 2.How are reading strategies employed by English high-achievers? 3.Does effective use of reading strategies positively correlate with high reading achievement? To answer these questions,120 second-grade high-achievers from a top-ranking senior high school are chosen as participants.Questionnaire survey and interview are used as research instruments.100 valid questionnaires are finally collected and analyzed by SPSS 22.0 including reliability test,validity test,descriptive statistics,correlation and regression analysis.Additionally,4 students and 6 English teachers are interviewed to know more about existing problems of using reading strategies and to identify the actual and potential problems in learning and teaching reading strategies.The main findings of the study are listed as follows: 1.Most of the participants have developed good reading habits and they can read English articles or do some reading comprehension exercise regularly.However,some students tend to read word by word and sentence by sentence instead of reading silently by sense groups.2.A majority of outstanding students are skilled in using reading strategies and they use meta-cognitive and socio-affective strategies more effectively than using cognitive strategies.3.Some high-achievers know little about reading strategies and fail to use strategies to solve reading problems flexibly and effectively.4.Students should be trained to improve the ability to deal with new words and complex sentences.Moreover,students should be introduced more knowledge about word formation.5.Using reading strategies effectively is positively correlated to examination results especially cognitive strategies.6.Some of English teachers pay little attention to studying reading strategies and just put a little emphasis on instructing reading strategies.Finally,based on the findings of the study,some suggestions for using reading strategies and instructing reading strategies are provided.