The Application Of Schema Theory In Reading Comprehension In Senior School

Reading is a complex intelligent activity and a psychological process of gaining information from the written language. In the reading comprehension of the second language, apart from the information transmitted by reading materials, the information that can not be seen plays an important roles. The background knowledge, conceptual abilities and process strategies function each other, and thus form comprehension of the materials. Reading teaching possesses an important position in Senior School English teaching. In order to conquer the obstacles the students meet with in the reading, this paper expounds on a method of solution — teaching method of English comprehension under the guidance of schema theory. It tries to explain the process of reading comprehension by using schema theory, and analyze the reasons of not understanding reading material. In addition, it explores the function of the schema theory in reading comprehension and puts forward the concrete design of how the schema theory functions in reading comprehension: The teachers should utilize the students' pre-existing schema knowledge and create new schema knowledge. Furthermore both the old and the new schema knowledge can interact each other for the purpose of improving the reading ability.Reading ability is determined by three schemata: they are linguistic schemata, content schemata and formal schemata. Linguistic schemata refer to the language familiarity of the reading material that the readers hold containing knowledge of lexical and syntactic structures. Content schemata themselves can be classified into different types: prior knowledge and world experience, knowledge about the subject matter of text , cultural knowledge and the knowledge relative to the content domain of the text. Since the introduction of discourse analysis into the language study, researchers began to pay more attention to discussion on formal schemata which are mainly, till now, composed of two sections. One sectionis about cohesion and coherence considering the organization within the sentence and the relationship between sentences, while the other is pertinent to the text type or pattern that we could call genre. It is to expound on the organization about paragraph level. Language and culture are connected with each other closely. A reader may fail to understand a text if he does not follow a Linguistic schema (coherent organization) or if content schema is lacking or if formal schema is strange to him.The traditional reading model maintains to read by using "Bottom-up", a passive decoding method, i.e. the readers can easily obtain the complete meaning of the text only by reading word by word and sentence by sentence. With the development of applicative linguistics and psychological linguistics, people find reading is not a process of passive decoding but an active process of "guessing - check"( Goodman, 1967 ), i.e. Top-down Model. Later artificial intelligent expert Rumelhart claimed that reading is the process when both the Bottom-up and Top-down models interact each other and process the character information at the same time. That is called Interactive Model. No matter which reading model should be taken, it is very difficult for us to understand the text without the background knowledge and schema knowledge interacting each other. We also call it Schema Theory. Schemata provide a framework for readers to check their understanding of the text, fill in information gaps within the text, and clarify ambiguities. Schema is a remembering structure, which represents knowledge at all levels from ideologies and cultural truths to knowledge about the meaning of a particular word, to knowledge about what patterns of excitations are associated with what letters of the alphabet and to various levels of our experience..Consideration is given in the latter part of the paper to the limitations of schema-theoretic applications and to the importance of extensive reading'.