Schema-Theory-Based Pre-Reading Activities: Their Effects On Chinese College Students' EFL Reading Comprehension

Reading, as one of the five fundamental skills in English learning plays a very important role in EFL acquisition. However, Chinese college students' reading ability is still not satisfactory. Widdowson (1986) defines reading as a communication activity. Goodman (1971) points out that reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game and it Involves an interaction between thought and language. Therefore, reading is an interactive process of communication. According to the concepts of reading, a number of theorists (i.e. Goodman, 1970; Smith, 1978) have developed interactive theories of reading. While these interactive theories which now dominate reading research and strongly influence teaching practice draw heavily on schema theory.Schema theory has been formulated to account for the role of the reader's background knowledge in language comprehension. A schema (singular), as understood in schema theory, represents generic knowledge. According to schema theory, readers' problems are related to absent or alternate schema, as well as non-activation of schema. In order to solve readers' problems, pre-reading activities should be used to accomplish both goals: building new background knowledge as well as activating existing background knowledge (Carrell, 1988b).The author investigated 85 college students' reading habits and reading difficulties by the form of questionnaire. It was found that most of subjects had bad reading habits and so many reading difficulties in their reading. Through the investigation on the situation about those 85 college students' extensive reading class and their pre-reading activities, the author found that College English teachers had not paid much attention to pre-reading activities and made full use of pre-reading activities to help college students comprehend the passage; meanwhile college students knew that background knowledge was very important for their reading, but they didn't know how to get background knowledge and they had weak awareness to use pre-reading activities. Therefore this thesis is to study the effect of schema-theory-based pre-reading activities on Chinese college students' EFL reading comprehension. Based on schema theory, the author setsup a hypothesis that schema-theory-based pre-reading activities will have good effects on college students' EFL reading comprehension. The first research question is to test this hypothesis. The second one is that if the answer to the first one is positive, which pre-reading activities are more available to Chinese college students' EFL reading comprehension. The third one is that which pre-reading activities are more available according to passages with different genres. The fourth one is that which pre-reading activities are more available according to students with different reading proficiencies.The subjects of this study were second-year Chinese non-English major undergraduates. Two tests and one retrospective report were involved in this study.Results showed that both college English teachers and college students lacked the use of schema-theory-based pre-reading activities in their reading classes. Meanwhile, the hypothesis of this study had been tested to be correct. That is, schema-theory-based pre-reading activities had good effects on Chinese college students' EFL reading comprehension. It was found that making predictions based on the title was the most available schema-theory-based pre-reading activity to Chinese college students' EFL reading comprehension; For the passages with the genre of autobiography, using schema-theory-based pre-reading activities had no obvious good effects; Using the schema-theory-based pre-reading activity that was key word association activity on the passages with the genre of exposition was proven the most available one to Chinese college students' EFL reading comprehension; Answering questions as one of the schema-theory-based pre-reading activities was the most available one to help college students to activate their existing background knowledge and construct their new background knowledge...