On Application Of Schema Theory To College English Reading Teaching

The concept of "schemata" was first put forward in the late 1600's,but it was finally theorized in the 1980's.Since then it has gradually become one of the most popular theories in second language acquisition studies.Researchers abroad show that schema theory has an important effect on English reading.Scholars at home have made some studies on the relationship between schema theory and English reading. which proves the effect of schema theory on reading comprehension,while there is little research on the application of schema theory to the classroom teaching of English reading,especially to the textbook—College English Integrated Course.This thesis is designed to teach college English reading by means of schema theory in order to find an effective way to improve students' reading comprehension.In a traditional classroom,the teacher is the center,and the students receive passively the information instructed by the teacher.In the traditional reading class,the teacher usually guides the students through a text slowly,explaining new words and phrases and analyzing the grammatical structure if necessary,followed by translating the sentences one by one.As a result,the students seldom have chances to participate actively in the reading process.They just remember the words and grammar points by rote.They understand the meaning of the single sentences without grasping the main idea and the structure of the text.Schema theory,on the other hand,believes that reading is an interactive process between reader's linguistic knowledge,social knowledge,cultural background knowledge,common sense and the upcoming information,in which the reader's background knowledge plays an important role.Schema theory lays theoretical foundations for prediction and decoding in the process.There are three kinds of schemata:linguistic schema,content schema and formal schema.According to schema theory,readers use both bottom-up and top-down approaches to interpret a text.In the process,readers should activate their schemata to interpret the new message.Readers' schemata determine what they comprehend,how well they comprehend and whether they can make an adequate comprehension.This thesis first reviews three models of reading and schema theory,then analyzes the reasons for students' poor reading comprehension,and explains how to apply the three kinds of schemata to the teaching of college English reading.To test the effect of schema-oriented teaching on students' reading comprehension,an experiment was carried out on 48 subjects from the Seed Science and Engineering Department and the Department of Agricultural Resources and Environment in Qingdao Agricultural University.In the experiment,the components in the textbook of College English Integrated Course are taught according to their own characteristics.The instruction of new words,phrases and complex sentence structures is guided by linguistic schemata through such methods as direct instruction,instruction of word formation and analysis of complex sentences,and semantic mapping.This aims to improve students' ability to predict new words and understand complex sentences,so as to develop their linguistic schemata.With the guidance of content schemata,the instruction of the text includes introducing key words,predicting what the text is about through the title. comparing the difference between Chinese and Western cultures,etc.The purpose is to provide students with some background knowledge,so as to,on one hand,develop their content schemata,and on the other hand,activate their prior knowledge.This is expected to help them have a better understanding of the text.Through the analysis of different characteristics of the textual organization of narration,description, exposition and argumentation,it is hoped that students' formal schemata will be developed,which,in turn,will facilitate their reading comprehension.To test the effects of schema-oriented teaching on students' reading comprehension,the author administered a pretest and a posttest.The pretest was to make sure that the experimental class and the control class were at the same level. After applying the schema-oriented teaching in the experimental class and traditional method in the control class,the posttest was carried.The analysis of the test results shows that there is a significant difference in the comprehension of linguistic-schema-related questions,content-schema-related questions and formal-schema-related questions respectively between the experimental class and the control class.Therefore,the results of the experiment suggest that the application of linguistic schema to the teaching of reading can help students enlarge their vocabulary, improve their ability to guess the meaning of new words,enhance their control over complex syntactic structures,and facilitate their reading comprehension.This suggests that the schema-oriented teaching of EFL reading has more positive effects on students' reading comprehension than the traditional teaching method.