The Application Of Schema Theory To English Reading Teaching In Secondary Vocational Schools

Reading is an indispensable part in human life,especially in English teaching and learning.Most students have mastered the basic vocabulary and grammar,but it is very difficult for them to improve their reading comprehension in an efficient way;for the secondary vocational school students,the situation is even worse.The secondary vocational school students often lack various background knowledge,such as knowledge of culture,geography,history,science and so on.Therefore,how to improve students' reading comprehension has been an urgent task for the teachers.At presrnt,reading theories and practice have seen dramatic improvements because of our growing understanding and accepting development in psychology,linguistics,psycholinguistics and language teaching.Reading is first viewed as rather passive decoding process.Later, people find that reading is not a passive decoding process,but an active psychological guessing game and an "interactive" process.No matter whether the process is "bottom-up","top-down" or "the interactive process", readers can't arrive at comprehension without their schematic knowledge.In fact,it is the readers' semantic and schematic knowledge working interactively together that makes them understand the meaning of a text (Widdowson,1984).Schema can be named frame,script or background knowledge. Bartlett(1932),in his classical book Remembering,defines schema as "an active organization of past reactions or past experience".In the 1980s, schema theory has developed into one of the most important parts of reading theory(Carrell＆Esterhold,1983),which clearly points out that people come to understand new information by activating their relevant schemata in their minds.The reader's right interpretation of a text is based on two conditions:the appropriate schemata relevant to the text and the relevant schemata successfully activated in the reading process.The schema theory has been formulated to account for the roles of the lingustic knowledge, textural knowledge and the reader's background knowledge in the reading comprehension.This thesis is to explore the effect of applying the schema theory to reading teaching in secondary vocational schools.It starts with the importance of English reading teaching and is followed by a retrospect of the researches on various reading theories and models.In order to find out whether the widely known schema theory and its teaching model can be applied effectively to English reading teaching in secondary vocational schools,the author makes questionnaires on problems of students' reading and teachers' instruction,especially the background knowledge and reading strategies before and after the experiment.The result of the pre-questionnaire shows that most students lack prior knowledge desired for reading comprehension and most teachers don't pay attention to background knowledge in reading teaching.The results of the post-questionnaire reveal that the students in the experimental class benifit from the schema-oriented teaching model and improve their reading ability.The experiment carried out in the Kindergarten Normal School of Hengyang from September,2007 to January,2008 proves the necessities of teachers' providing students with related background knowledge before reading.Two classes,each consisting of 50 subjects with the same level of English proficiency,are chosen respectively as the control class and the experimental class.In the experimental class,schema-oriented teaching model is adopted,aiming to improve the students' reading ability by activating the former schemata and constructing new schemata through all kinds of classroom activities;while in the control class,traditional teaching method is utilized as usual.Data collected from pre-test,post-test,pre-questionnaire, post-questionnaire and class observations are analyzed by SPSS(Statistical Package for Social Science,version 10) and statistical charts to discover(1) differences between the questionnaire results before and after the experiment;(2) differences between the scores of pre-test and post-test of both classes.The analyzed data indicates that the students in the experimental class have improved their English reading abilities more explicitly and rapidly than those in the control class.At the same time,both the students in high-score group and those in low-score group have got great improvement in English reading during this experiment.The findings of this study indicated as follows:The schema-oriented teaching method has improved the reading comprehension,increased the reading speed,enabled the students to use effective reading strategies and skills,developed the students' vocabulary and helped the students form good reading habits.Finally,the author also emphasizes the significance of schema theory applied to English reading teaching in secondary vocational schools, proposes some efficient suggestions on reading teaching based on schema theory to help students with activiation and construction of their schemata through some strategies and practical ways and points out the limitations in the experiment study for further research in this aspect.