The Relationship between English Reading Strategies and Comprehension

Abstract

Reading provides the visual input that serves as the basis for languageacquisition and enables learners to interact in written and spoken communication. Also, reading is a receptive behavior in knowledge acquisition. The purpose of this study was to discover learners' effective English reading strategies as an essential ability for their learning process so as to increase their English reading achievement for the certificate of the TOEIC (the Test of English for International Communication) class. Other purposes were to investigate which reading strategies adult learners lack and which strategies can be used in the instruction to compensate for the deficiencies in order for learners to attain better English reading comprehension.The participants were 35 adult learners from two non-traditional-aged classes, including fourteen students from Pingtung Labor College and twenty-one from Meiho University's College of Continuing Education. The experiment lasted for one semester. Both classes used the same TOEIC textbook under the guidance of the same instructor and followed the same curriculum. At the end of the semester, thirty-one learners were given the two questionnaires. One questionnaire was developed to investigate learners' application of different strategies in reading comprehension. The other questionnaire was designed to evaluate from learners' perspectives if indeed the reading strategies did facilitate learners’ reading comprehension and to collect learners' responses and suggestions about the training.The findings showed that the most often-used category among learners was compensation strategies; with the next being, memory strategies. The least often-used strategy was meta-cognitive. Female learners reported using both cognitive and memory strategies more often than males did, but no overall differences were found between the genders. The English reading strategies most commonly used didn't positively improve the learners’ English reading comprehension. After all, learners would not use the same strategy for reading a newspaper as they would for reading a textbook. Finally, the study concludes that reading instruction requires learners to do a great deal of reading practice over an extended period of time and to have much exposure to reading in order to improve their English reading ability.