Facilitating High School Students' English Reading With Schema-oriented Teaching Method In China

The purpose of this thesis is to improve senior middle-school students' English reading ability with a 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 background knowledge while the formal schema emphasizes text structure.Many researchers have applied their researches to reading instruction. The final results showed that activating both content and formal schema can facilitate native speakers or ESL/EFL speakers'reading comprehension. 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 middle-school students, their reading comprehension is highly required in the College Entrance Examination and their reading ability is the guarantee of their further study.Encouraged by those prior positive results in the experiment under the framework of schema, the writer of this paper conducted her one-term experiment study in Grade Two of Inner Mongolia Bao Gang No. 1 Senior Middle School. The research following the schema-oriented instruction model aims at helping the students activate the schemata stored in their mind so as to improve their English reading comprehension.Two classes consisting of 40 students each were chosen respectively as a control group and an experimental group with the same level of English proficiency. In the experimental class, schema-oriented instruction model was adopted during teaching. The teaching procedure goes as follows: 1) Activate schemata: Facilitate the related schemabefore reading. 2) Reconstruct a new schema: Focus on comprehending the whole text by both emphasizing basic language knowledge and the meaning analysis in order to improve the students'English reading ability. 3) Consolidate schemata: examine the students'comprehension and help them reinforce the learned knowledge after reading. In the control class, traditional lecturing method was utilized as usual.Data collection includes both various test such as pre-test, mid-test and post-test, questionnaire surveys and a post informal class interview as a qualitative data complement. Data analysis focuses on 1) differences in achievements in pre-test ,mid-test and post-test proved by Z-test 2) the questionnaires of students'performances during the experiment The results of data analysis indicates that in the schema-oriented teaching framework, students in the experimental class improved their English reading ability more rapidly than the control class. Their reading strategies and awareness of schemata building and activation of the formal class also developed very quickly.From the experiment, we got the following results1) Schema-oriented teaching method can be used to improve senior students reading comprehension in a senior middle 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.The author concludes that it is both feasible and beneficial to use schema-oriented instruction in Chinese senior middle-school English classrooms...