A Comparative Study of Reading Strategies Used by Chinese English Majors

In this thesis, by means of questionnaire, we made an investigation into the reading strategies used by Chinese first-year and third-year English majors. The purpose of this study attempts to identify the typical types of reading strategies among English majors in a normal university of China, and also, to examine what differences exist in strategy use by first-year and third-year students. The output shows all the three reading strategies, whether metacognitive, cognitive or social/affective strategies are widely used by English majors in normal university. Nevertheless, differences do exist in the degree of popularity of some specific reading strategy items. The difference in use of reading strategies between first-year and third-year students is that the former are reported to employ much more social/affective strategies while the latter do much better in metacognitive and cognitive strategies. From what discussed, we know that readers can benefit a lot from appropriate reading strategies in reading, so it is possible and necessary for teachers to offer reading strategy instruction for the students and also different strategy instruction should be offered to students in different grades.