Application Of The Schema Theory In Senior Middle School English Reading Teaching

The 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 reader's 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. Results show that activating both content and formal schema can facilitate native speakers or ESIVEFL speakers' reading comprehension. With introduction of schema theory into China, many Chinese scholars in universities and teachers in middle schools have conducted researches in their teaching practice and obtained some expected achievements in the teaching of English reading. But they have seldom made researches into the influence of content familiarity and context provision on English reading comprehension and how schema-oriented instruction affects the students of different levels to answer different types of reading comprehension questions.The purpose of this thesis is to improve senior middle-school students' English reading ability with a schema-oriented teaching method based on Senior English as a Foreign Language in China of Students' Books, namely, SEFCSB (2003 Edition) Senior I. As for most teachers, it is a challenge to enhance the students' reading ability with the new teaching material. Therefore, we conducted a two-term empirical study in Grade One of Hunan Xiangtan No. 1 Senior Middle School. The study 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 46 students each were chosen respectively as a control group and an experimental group with the same level of English proficiency. In the empirical class, the schema-oriented instruction model was adopted. The teaching methods went as follows: 1) Activate schema: Facilitate related schema before reading; 2) Build up new schema: Focus on comprehending the whole text by both emphasizing basic knowledge of genre and discourse markers in order to improve the students' English reading ability. 3) Consolidate schema: 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 three parts: 1) questionnaire surveys for the changes in students' reading strategies and preferences; 2) the test for the influence of content familiarity and context provision on reading comprehension; 3) the test for the students' reading proficiency, which is about how the schema-oriented instruction model affects the students of different levels to answer different types of reading comprehension questions. Besides, a post informal class interview and the observation log are written down as a qualitative analysis.From the experiment, we have obtained the following results:1) Background knowledge had great effects on reading comprehension. The more background knowledge readers had, the better they could comprehend.2) The students' abilities to grasp main ideas and make inferences from the given passage were significantly enhanced. However, it does not seem to influence their performance on locating specific information in the passage.3) The less able readers benefited more from the training than more able readers.Therefore, we conclude that it is both feasible and beneficial to use schema-oriented instruction in Chinese senior middle school English classrooms, especially for the less able students; at the same time, teachers should encourage students to read more and strengthen language study so as to improve their reading efficiency on all sides.