Reading Strategies and Approaches to Learning of Bilingual Primary School Pupils Zhenhui Rao Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, P.R. China Peter Yongqi Gu Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Lawrence Jun Zhang and Guangwei Hu Nanyang Technological University, Singapore The research reported here investigated primary school pupils’ use of reading strate- gies. The study differed from most of the previous studies on reading strategies in that (1) the participants were young bilinguals in multicultural Singapore; (2) the data were examined within the Student Approaches to Learning (SAL) framework developed by John Biggs (1993). Analyses of think-aloud data revealed that successful pupils made more frequent use of deep-level processing strategies (e.g. inferencing, prediction, reconstruction, questioning of the text) while less successful pupils more often de- ployed surface-level processing strategies (e.g. paraphrasing, re-reading, questioning the meaning of a word or phrase). The findings suggest that children’s reading efficacy is affected by their use of learning strategies and that teachers should integrate the training of deep level reading strategies into their reading instruction. They should direct their pupils’ attention towards the intentional content of the reading material (what is signified) rather than towards learning the text itself (the sign) in their actual teaching practice. doi: 10.2167/la423.0 Keywords: young learners, bilinguals, reading strategies, deep approach, sur- face approach Introduction Since the 1970s, many language learning theorists have emphasised the im- portance of learning strategies in successful language learning and some have even advocated teaching students a variety of reading strategies in order to help them to read better (Cohen, 1998). Reading strategies are defined by these spe- cialists as mental operations relating to how readers perceive a task, what textual cues they attend to, how they make sense of what they read, and what they do when they do not understand. Strategies, therefore, are readers’ resources for understanding and learning (Langer, 1982). Much of the previous research of reading strategies has concentrated on de- scribing those strategies which are involved in understanding. Many researchers 0965-8416/07/04 243-20 $20.00/0 C  2007 Z. Rao et al. LANGUAGE AWARENESS Vol. 16, No. 4, 2007 243