The Application Of Schema Theory To Business English Reading Teaching In Vocational & Technical Colleges

Reading is an essential approach of information and language acquisition. With the development of regional economy, closer attention is being paid to Business English (BE) reading teaching in higher vocational and technical education. On the basis of analyzing characteristics and roles of schemata in BE reading, this thesis, targeting students in technical colleges as subjects, thus explores the application of schema theory to teaching BE reading in vocational & technical colleges.Business English reading shares the common ground with general ESL or EFL reading in terms of reading processes and models, namely, top-down process, bottom-up process and interactive process. Schema (Cook 1989) which refers to pre-existent knowledge or background knowledge in one's mind is acknowledged to be of great importance in reading comprehension. According to schema theory (Carrell and Eisterhold 1983), schemata are generally classified into three categories, namely, linguistic, formal and content schema. In reading comprehension, the interaction of readers' prior knowledge and incoming textual information often takes place in interactive reading process to enhance reading comprehension. In top-down process, readers start reading with predictions by the prior knowledge; while in bottom-up process, readers acquire information from decoding lexical units, grammar inflections and so on.With specific characteristics, three types of schemata play conjointly a crucial role in interactive reading process to achieve efficient BE reading comprehension. The characteristic of linguistic schema is embodied by BE vocabulary in terms of specificity of business, polysemant and acronyms; the feature of formal schema is embodied by the textual structures or layouts which are established by usage; and the content schema is discipline or subject-specific and culture-specific. In case of availability and activation of appropriate schemata in reading processes, efficient reading comprehension could be achieved; on the contrary, unavailability or non-activation of any relevant schemata most likely breaks down reading comprehension.This study thus explores the pedagogical strategies of accumulating and activating schemata in teaching BE reading in terms of selecting reading materials and designing classroom activities, such as providing background knowledge through the simulation of business activities, activating key vocabularies together with their business background knowledge by semantic mapping, encouraging narrow reading for accumulating linguistic and content schemata in particular, etc. On the basis of students-centered communicative approach, a tentative model for teaching BE reading is thus proposed to conclude the strategies, which focus on schemata accumulation and activation in BE context, and with the purpose of cultivating reading strategies of employing schemata in interactive process to facilitate reading comprehension.An experiment is designed, according to the "pretest-posttest control group design", to test the validity and availability of the model which is applied to BE reading teaching in vocational & technical colleges. Two classes majored in Business English are randomly designed as an experimental class and a control class. The experimental period lasts for 16 weeks, during which the experimental class is treated through applying schema theory to reading teaching and the other class is taught in traditional way characterized as teacher-centered, grammar-word translation based. With the aid of SPSS (13.0), the results of pre and posttest are statistically analyzed, as well as the post-experimental questionnaire. Positive conclusions demonstrate that compared with traditional way, teaching applied schema theory has greatly assisted students in accumulating plentiful schemata, activating appropriate schemata and cultivating strategies of employing appropriate schemata in interactive process to achieve consequent better reading comprehension and better results of reading tests. Implications of the empirical study for teaching are concluded as well, such as teaching on the basis of needs analysis of students who are in vocational & technical colleges; reorientation of teacher's and student's role in BE reading teaching; lighting on building BE content and linguistic schemata the students in dire need of; cultivating reading strategies of employing appropriate schemata in interactive process to facilitate comprehension and improve results of reading tests.This study has attempted to serve as an introduction of schema theory and a tentative study of its applications to teaching BE reading in vocational & technical colleges. It is also expected, as a rough guide, to provide more insight into BE reading teaching in vocational & technical colleges and serve BE reading teaching which could meet the needs of students and achieve the goal of higher vocational and technical education.