The Influence Of Schema On Chinese College Students' Reading Comprehension

In China, as English is a foreign language to be learned, reading is a vital factor, for it is the important approach for students to acquire foreign language knowledge and skills. For many students of English, reading is by far the most important of the four skills in the foreign language (Carrell 1989). Reading, which is a complex psychological cognitive process, is an interactive process of constructing meaning between writer's information and reader's knowledge. Effective teaching to improve learners' reading comprehension is also the focus in college English teaching. This paper analyses the effect of schema theory on reading process and compares the impact of schema on participants' comprehension in different styles of literary reading.To date, many linguists have widely discussed the effect of schema theory on reading and conducted a number of relative researches, among which the studies of the effect of content schema and formal schema on participants' reading comprehension are the representative. However, there are only a few studies, which focus on the effects of content schema and formal schema on ESL learners' comprehension of different literary styles reading. Therefore, in order to examine whether different schema have different effects on literary styles reading, this study carried out two tests, the pre-test and the post-test, plus a schema-oriented training course in the middle period, examined the effects of schema on Chinese EFL learners' reading comprehension of two different literary styles: narrative passages and expository passages.100 college EFL students from a college grade two in Hebei province were employed as the research subjects. Test passages included two kinds of literary styles——narrative passage 1 with familiar' content, narrative passage 2 with unfamiliar content, expository passage 1 with familiar content and expository passage 2 with unfamiliar content. According to quantitative analyses of collected data, the research results showed that content schema and formal schema affect different literary styles reading comprehension differently. Especially content schema affects reading comprehension in narration more than exposition. And formal schema does help reading when readers lack of familiar content schema in comprehension.The research results not only provide valid and reliable information for but also give insights into China's English teaching of reading. The findings of the research have some implications for college English teachers in China: They had better give attention to the schema effect on different literary reading and advance their teaching methods so as to improve students' reading proficiency.