| The topic of reading has been viewed as a crucial issue to both first and second language educators and researchers for a long time. It is a complex psychological procedure which consists of cognition, interpretation, abstraction and application. It is regarded as the one of most important ways and tools to learn. Reading comprehension comprises various elements. In order to improve it, reading strategy is vital. Strategy is the skill, approach or intended action conducted by students in order to learn or recall language or information. There are large quantities of reading strategies adopted in the EFL teaching and learning. In the thesis, the schema-theoretic applications are discussed.Schema was put forward by Kant's work in 1781. The concept of schema was applied by British psychologist F.Burtlett in 1932. In the late of 1970s, with a large number of researches, American artificial intelligence expert D.E.Rumelhart and his colleagues developed it into a systematic theory. In schema theory, any language material, no matter it is oral or written, is meaningless. It only refers to the procedure that the listener or the reader recovers or constructs the information according to the existing knowledge. In reading comprehension, the first step is to input the information, then to trace the schema to explain it in the memory. When it is found, the comprehension appears. It is said that the procedure of reading comprehension is that of connecting the schema in a reader's mind with the information provided by the material. And they interact with each other to obtain the meaning which the writer tends to convey to readers. The schema theory in 1970s has a great impact on the teaching of reading, which contains language schema and content schema. The language schema refers to vocabulary, grammar and idiomatic usage, while the content schema refers to the meaning of language and the cultural background knowledge. Both play important roles in reading comprehension and they are dispensable. Therefore, in the class activities, the teaching approaches should arouse the schema in students'mind. Through the discussion of the title, subtitle and key words and so on, students are inspired to search the existing background knowledge and meanwhile teachers intervene the activity positively.Especially in the information explosion age, new knowledge increasing so rapidly, it is significant to cultivate reading skills of college students. Taylor (1975) also emphasizes"...reading has to be fast to be successful." Grabe(1991)once pointed:"...a description of reading has to account for the notions that fluent reading, flexible, and gradually developing." So the efficiency of reading comprehension is important to obtain main information and to maintain the interest in reading.In order to achieve the goal, the application of reading strategies is very important. Ellis (1994:531) once claimed "techniques, approaches or deliberate actions that students take in order to facilitate the learning, recall of both linguistic and content area information". In China some experts, such as Wen Qiufang (2003) pay their attention to it as well.In teaching practice, the research of reading strategy has a positive effect on the EFL. The experiment has proved that reading strategies can be applied in a quite effective way, and the schema-theoretic approaches are not only easy-to-use but also applicable in classroom teaching. Thus, the study has great pedagogical implications.Reading comprehension concerns a lot of respects. And being an efficient reader is a necessary quality for college students. In recent years, reading comprehension plays a greater role in a variety of English tests such as TEM, PETS and new CET4&CET6. Although there are reading materials in each unit of the text books in order to cultivate students' reading ability, most teachers just translate the long reading briefly for the time limit with little introduction of reading strategies. Therefore students do not know how to learn the reading strategies effectively.The Schema Theory which aroused great attention in 1970s makes a lot influence on the teaching practice about reading. The schema-theoretic model urges the reform of the reading training. The traditional teaching of reading based on grammar-translation has been prevailing. This teaching model possesses some demerits that inhabit the development of the students' reading proficiency and reading skills rather than promote them. It views the EFL as a passive decoding process, in which new words, phrases and even sentence patterns are taken as discrete language points and elaborated upon by the teacher but the background knowledge and the reading speed are ignored. And the schema theory can aid to compensate it for it emphasizes the influence of the background knowledge on the readers during the reading process. Cook once pointed out in 1997 that with the help of schema theory readers can sense the world to enhance the reading effect. Therefore in the teaching activities, teachers should arouse the schema in students mind by discussing the title, illustrations and some key words of the reading materials to impulse the students predict according to their background knowledge, which can make up for students' lack of vocabulary storage and insufficiency of sentence structure. It will overcome the obstacle of reading word by word and sentence by sentence.The thesis combines the theory analysis and experiment to investigate. At first, in order to procure a preliminary understanding of schema theory, this thesis reviews five aspects of schema:main definitions, categories, characteristics, functions and limitations of schema.The questionnaire, teaching strategy and fast reading tests are adopted in the experiment.80 first-year non-English major undergraduates who were selected at random in Jilin University participated in the experiment to explore the effect of the 15-week's training of the schema-theoretic approaches on fast and traditional reading, The experiment group consisted of 40 undergraduates from Department of Software Application; the control group included 40 students from the same department. The variables such as age, gender, native language, and vocabulary level were controlled so as not to cloud the results. In the control group students only learn reading comprehension under the instruction of the traditional reading strategy, while in the experiment group activities connected with schema-theoretic approaches, which included three stages (schema-theoretic applications instruction; the class activities and the questionnaire) to acknowledge students' reading barriers and to solve the problems with the schema-theoretic approaches. Then the result and the data of the experiment were analyzed in quantity and quality.In theory the research of fast reading strategy is insufficient. And application the schema theoretic approaches to non-English college students in both fast reading and traditional one is a new attempt. In teaching practice, the research of fast reading strategy has a positive effect on the EFL. The experiment has proved that reading strategy can be taught in a quite effective way, and the schema-theoretic approaches are not only easy-to-use but also applicable in classroom teaching. Thus, the study has great pedagogical implications. For the schema-theoretic approaches have special characteristics individual differences of the participants, and the diverse interpretations of the reading strategy by different teachers, the process and the result of the experiment would be different. Therefore, it needs further research and experiment to make it more reliable in the field. |
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