AWARENESS OF READING STRATEGIES AMONG IRANIAN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Reading seems to be the most essential and economic aspect of language learning. People in the far reaches of the earth can rely on that as a way of learning a language. Individuals can go through reading a text in their own speed and handle it in their own way. Iranian students experience almost 7 years of English education within the framework of educational department and spend a lot of time and money on studying English, meanwhile the outcome is not satisfactory. Various reasons and causes could be sought for to the issue. One of the skills Iranian students are, at least expected to gain relative mastery over is "reading comprehension", however, Iranian learners in the high schools find it as problematic as the other skills and show poor performance in this regard. An assumption which could be phrased is students' lack of awareness of reading strategies. The purpose of the present study was to measure Iranian high school students' awareness of (English) reading strategies. To do this, a descriptive research was conducted in 2 Tehran State-run high schools. 30 boys and 30 girls, all aged 17and 18, reported about the frequency of their using reading strategies through Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) which is a questionnaire developed and validated by Mokhtari & Sheorey (2002). The scores obtained through the questionnaires were transferred into three bar charts, 1 for each category of strategies. The bar graphs suggest that in case of global and problem solving strategies the subjects are not highly strategic readers. The support strategies graph also goes with this idea but the difference is that it shows much more consistency in the subjects' score than the other two categories.