Investigating Chinese English Majors’ Use of Reading Strategies : A Study on the Relationship between Reading Strategies and Reading Achievements 

Abstract: For several decades, reading strategies have aroused many researchers’ interest.Readingis a very important language skill for English learners; however, many English majors feel that their reading proficiency is far from satisfying though they have studied English for more than ten years. Therefore, the current situation of using reading strategies among Chinese sophomore English majors is studied in this paper. The research aims to study the relationship between the use of reading strategies and the students’ reading achievements. The reading comprehension part of TEM 4 (2006) and two questionnaires are adopted in this study to collect data from the investigated students. The participants are 54 English major sophomores from a university in China. The major findings of this study are: English majors use reading strategies in medium level when doing reading comprehension tests. Both metacognitive and cognitive reading strategies significantly correlate with reading achievements and both of them play important roles in reading comprehension. There are differences in the application of reading strategies between high-proficiency readers and low-proficiency readers. Teachers do not pay high attention to instructing reading strategies in the classroom, so some pedagogical implications on the teaching of reading strategies are suggested.