English Narrative Schema Training And Its Effect On Reading Comprehension

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects on the reading comprehension through English narrative schema training under the theoretic framework of schema theory. The study focused on narrative schema training and its effects in EFL learning, and the subjects were Chinese-speaking English learners of senior high school. Meanwhile, we also tried to explore the relationship between EFL learners' development of text-structure schema and their reading proficiency.The educational implication of schema theory has long been the topic of extensive discussion in the circle of foreign language teaching in China. Schema was originally a philosophical concept proposed by Kant, then developed and perfected by the first Gestalt psychologist Bartlett and artificial intelligence (AI) specialist Rumelhart. Now the theory has not only been well approached but also been greatly extended. Schema theory has been used to interpreted many aspects of mental process, for it enjoys a powerful interpretation and high generality. Based on this theory, an experiment was conducted. The result of the present experiment suggested that schema training in regular English class had a significant effect on the improvement of comprehension in narrative reading, by strengthening their sensitivity to narrative structure, the subjects significantly improve their reading comprehension. Furthermore, subjects with different proficiency obtain different benefits from the training, especially low-level learners benefited more in the training.