The Study of Training EFL Reading Strategies in English Reading Class

Abstract

The main objectives of the present study were to explore whether the various EFL reading strategy training methods were effective in improving University of Technology EFL students' reading comprehension abilities and to investigate how students with various English reading proficiencies (high, intermediate, and low levels) were impacted by the training methods. The test subjects were 96 freshmen majoring in Applied Foreign Languages at a University of Technology. One day before the reading strategy training, all participants were given a reading comprehension pre-test. Three months later, when the participants finished the 36-hour-long training, all participants were given the same reading comprehension test as a post-test. The trained strategies in this study consisted of three kinds of reading strategies: looking for the main ideas, making inferences, and looking for specific information in the text. According to the paired-samples t test analyses, the result has shown that the reading strategy training has increased University of Technology EFL students' reading proficiency in the low and intermediate reading proficiency groups. On a contrary, the result has shown that the strategy training would not increase students' reading proficiency in the high reading proficiency group. Among the three training methods, the training method of ”making inferences” was the best teaching method in overall groups.