A Study Of The Application Of Schema Theory In SEFC Reading Teaching

Reading is a complex intellectual process of obtaining information from written texts and a psychological process of gaining meanings from the text as well.Reading in high schools has always been the focus of the whole teaching procedure in L2 teaching and at the same time it is both the centre of foreign language learning and a learning measure.However,the teaching results and the learning results among of the majority of the high schools are far from satisfactory.The part of reading comprehension of the college test papers becomes tougher and tougher for students to deal with,with the flexible sorts of passages.In this situation,the students have many problems in reading such as reading speed,reading efficiency,reading strategies,the ability of getting more information and decoding it and so on.In a matter of fact,students can only understand the surface meaning of reading materials or they are in the state of reading without understanding.Besides,in today's English classes in high schools,teachers are still emphasizing the explanations of language points.Although the teachers have explained masses of reading materials and the students have also read a lot outside the class,their reading ability is no better than what they used to be and their reading proficiency has not been improved yet.Reading and understanding are indispensable factors.Understanding lays foundation for the significance of reading and reading without understanding means nothing.Due to the importance of reading to our students,this paper concerns the problem of reading teaching in the classrooms of Chinese senior high schools.And it also tries to find an effective approach to the reading teaching in senior high school classrooms.In order to find out whether the widely known schema theory and its instruction model can be applied effectively at Chinese senior high English level,the author decided to write a thesis on the feasible instructional patterns of this model based on her research about achievements in this field and an experimental study she actually carried out in No. 24 Senior High School in the city of Xiangfan.Conducted from September to December, 2007 in No.24 Senior High School,the research used the schema-oriented instruction model,aiming to promote schema activation and schema building in English reading instruction. Two classes each consisting of 50 students were chosen respectively as the control group and the experimental group for their same level of English proficiency.While in the experimental class,schema-oriented instruction model was adopted,in the control class,traditional teaching method was utilized as usual.Data collection involved the means such as pre-test,periodic measurements and post-test,Data analysis focused on 1) differences in achievements in pre-test and post-test and the z-test of the scores.2)the t-test of the scores of both high and low score groups ih the experiment class.The results of research indicated that in this teaching framework,students in the experimental class improved their English reading ability more rapidly than the control class,extended their reading strategies and developed into good habits of reading.The teachers can also measure the teaching model quickly after some training.Thus,the author concludes that it is both feasible and beneficial to use schema-oriented instruction in Chinese senior high English classrooms.All these demonstrate that schema-oriented instruction model is of great value in improving Chinese senior high students' English reading comprehension.It can help students develop reading efficiency and form good reading habits.