An Experimental Study Of The Application Of Schema Theroy To The Teaching Of English Reading In College

English reading is an important component in college English teaching. Adapting effective teaching method to improve students'reading ability has always been a great concern for teachers. Since the 1970s, linguists both at home and abroad have put forward schema theory to reading process. They hold that integrating reader's background knowledge and prior experience into the text being read, can improve his reading comprehension.This study was guided by this schema theory, combining with the assigned textbook New Horizon College English (Second Edition) Volume 1. The author adopted quantitative and qualitative research methods:an experimental teaching practice and an interview after teaching to investigate the effect of using schema theory in the teaching of English reading. The experiment, which lasted sixteen weeks, was carried out upon 70 freshmen in two classes majoring in accounting in Shandong University of Science and Technology. One class was taught as the control class (CC) and the other as the experimental class (EC). In the CC, traditional grammar-translation teaching method was utilized as usual, while in the EC, schema-oriented model was adopted. During the experiment, for the selected reading materials, different schemata were used to teach the students. For linguistic schema, the focus was on teaching of vocabulary and syntax knowledge with a view to enhance the students'ability to guess word meaning from the context and their ability to analyze complex syntactic structure. For content schema, the teaching helped students through the analysis of key words and topic sentences to predict the text content, and encouraged them to make comparisons of culture differences between China and foreign counties to accumulate rich background knowledge for students. Questioning, brainstorming and group discussion could open their mind and encourage their thoughts to deepen their understanding to the whole texts. For formal schema, the different writing styles and characteristics were analyzed to be applied in teaching, in order to help the students understand and command the structure and organization of the text as well as the main idea.In order to verify that schema-oriented teaching can improve students'reading comprehension ability, the author carried out a pre-test to test reading comprehension ability of the subjects to determine the EC and CC were in a similar level. After sixteen-week teaching a post-test was carried out to the two classes. The data were collected and analyzed. The results of t-test do not show a significant difference between the two groups of the students. However, through the interview to student representatives after the experimental teaching, the subjects from EC expressed that they had obtained great interest in English reading class. They thought their reading ability had been improved to great extent after the sixteen-week learning in reading class. The author made an analysis and discussion based on all the results, and proposed some implications for teaching of English reading in college. Meanwhile, the limitations in the study and some suggestions for further study were also put forward.