The Influence Of Schema Theory On Professional College Students' EFL Reading Comprehension

In the past 30 years, reading theories and practices had seen dramatic improvements because of our growing understanding and accepting of the developments in psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics and language teaching. Reading was first viewed as a rather passive decoding process. Later, people find that reading is not a passive decoding process, but an active"psycholinguistic guessing game"(Goodman,1967: l35)and an "Interactive" process(Carrell,l988).No matter the process is "Bottom-Up", "Top-Down" or "Interactive" process, readers can't arrive at comprehension without their schematic knowledge. In fact, it is the readers' semantic and schematic knowledge worked interactively together that make theme understand the meaning of a text.Carrell's schema theory has been basically explored in the first language reading and applied in the second language. But there is some relationships between Ll and L2 or FL. We should not only understand the developments of second or foreign language reading theories and practices, but also need to learn some theories and practices from first language in order to get useful insight for ESL or EFL reading practices. Schema theory has influenced our college English reading since 1980s, but the relevant research in professional college is lacking.The paper was an empirical one based on schema theory. It was about how schema theory could be applied to EFL reading and how we could help the students activate the schemata stored in their minds. It should be emphasized that the experiment was designed to test the influence of a specific training technique based on schema theory for the students' English reading comprehension, but it was not to intended to test the schema theory. There are five parts in this thesis. The first part stated the purpose and significance of the experiment; The second part was about literature review; The third part illustrated the correlations between the schema theory and how the teacher helped the students activate the schemata stored in the minds; The fourth part was application of schema theory in professional college. The fifth part was our experimental design; The sixth part was our conclusion, that is, the experimental methodology had a significant effect on improving the students' English reading. We drew the conclusion from the data analyses.In view of that, we conducted an experiment in Hebei Professional College to examine whether it could be used to improve EFL students' reading ability. The subjects were in Grade One and non-English majors. In the course of experiment, the students predicted what they read according to their schemata to get access to the information. After this study, most of the experimental students expressed more confidence themselves as EFL readers,do not fear reading English articles like the early years; They can apply schema theory knowledge to English reading passages accurately, and the speed and level of reading should be improved extraordinarily clear. One role of the teacher is to make the students be aware activating the appropriate schemata or guidance them and help them bridge the gap between new schemata and existing schemata.