Facilitate High School Students' Reading With Schema-oriented Teaching Method

The purpose of this study is to improve the senior students' reading comprehension efficiently with schema-oriented teaching method.Schema theory is widely used to illustrate the reading process and many linguistic experts and scholars give different kinds of explanations about it. The general idea given by schematic theorists is that reading comprehension is an interactive process between the readers' background knowledge and the text; an interaction of bottom-up and top-down processing, in which content schema and formal schema work simultaneously. The content schema emphasizes on background knowledge while the formal schema emphasizes on text structure. The true understanding is created through the interaction of reader and text.In the framework of schema theory, many researchers have carried out their studies with the purpose of finding efficient way to improve their teaching quality. The final results showed that activating both content and formal schema can facilitate native English or ESL reading. With introduction of schema theory into China, many Chinese scholars in universities conducted researches in their teaching practice and obtained some expected achievements in teaching of reading. To senior students in high school, their reading comprehension is highly required in the College Entrance Examination and reading ability is the guarantee of their further study. Many senior students in our school have reading problems although they spent a lot of time in it. Encouraged by those prior positive results in the experiment under the framework of schema, I began to conduct my study in Wuwei No.2 High School in order to improve students' reading comprehension with utilizing the schema-oriented teaching method instead of present traditional lecturing method, which was usually adopted in reading class in our school.I designed my research in the framework of schema with utilizing CarrelPs research model and Guye's schema-oriented teaching method to conduct the experiment. In experimental class, schema-oriented teaching method was adopted. It advocates that in reading class teachers should manage to activate students' content and formal schemata with activities of semantic mapping and top-level structure organizing. And in control class, traditional teaching method is utilized.Before the research, the selection of subjects, testing materials, research measurements werecarefully designed. Data collections of testing scores and answers of questionnaires are collected with great care during the experimental period. After the experiment, integrated analysis of students' performance and statistical data is made with the help of computer (EX CEL). From the experiment, we got the following results:1) Schema-oriented teaching method can be used to improve senior students reading comprehension in high school.2) Utilizing schema-oriented teaching method in reading class can make students more active.3) Schema-oriented teaching method can be used to help students to develop good reading habits. So we concluded that this study is of great value in improving students' reading ability.