Towards A New Model Of Schema Training Strategies For The Teaching Of English Reading

Reading is an indispensable part in human life, especially in education. In bilingual education and examinations such as NMET, CET-4, CET-6 in China, reading is obtaining more and more emphasis and weight. And reading is the main process and practical solution to improving one's second or foreign language proficiency.In class instruction, most students have mastered the basic vocabulary and grammar, but they are still poor in reading comprehension and reading strategies. Traditionally, teachers just focused their attention on basic language instruction; reading was considered as a passive action on the part of the reader, and there was not enough place in actual reading teaching. Therefore, enhancing reading teaching and research on improving students' reading comprehension should be the main focus.Although there has been much research on reading teaching and reading strategies recently, empirical evidence for effective reading in which there is a dynamic interaction between students and reading materials remains to be explored, especially in Chinese environment where English is a foreign language. In view of this, the author, based on the knowledge of various reading theories and research, and through empirical study of an experiment, puts forward a model of effective reading teaching strategies, that is, schema training strategies, based on schema theory of reading.Schema theory originated in the psychological field in the 1930s, and was later applied to the study of human intelligence and discourse analysis. Modern research on schema theory, established and developed by Rumelhart, an American human intelligence expert, began in the late 1970s. With the development of cognitive psychology, more and more linguists tended to conduct researches on the reading process from the perspective of cognitive psychology and achieved fruitful results. With these results, Carrell (1983) called the reader's prior knowledge "schema" and thus "schema theory" was produced. According to the schema theory, a reader's right interpretation of a text is based on the two conditions: the appropriate schemata relevant to the text and the relevant schemata successfully activated in the reading process. The schema theory has thus been formulated to account for the role of the reader's background knowledge in language comprehension.This paper is to explore the effect of schema training strategies in the process of...