Effects Of Pre-reading Activities On Senior High School Students' Reading Comprehension

With the issue of New English Course Standard, senior high school students are required to reach a higher level in reading, but, in reality, reading is a big headache for students. Traditionally, in senior high English classes, reading skills tend to get neglected or are practiced inappropriately or inadequately, especially in the pre-reading phase. According to schema theory, reading comprehension may be improved when readers' background knowledge is built or activated before reading and pre-reading activities should be used to accomplish these two goals: building new background knowledge as well as activating existing background knowledge.The author investigated 100 senior high school students' situation on pre-reading activities by the form of questionnaire, found to find that they had weak awareness to use pre-reading activities before reading. Therefore, this thesis is to study the effects of schema-theory-based pre-reading activities on senior high school students' reading comprehension. Based on schema theory, the author sets up a hypothesis that the schema-theory-based pre-reading activities will have good effects on senior high school students' reading comprehension. The first research question is to test the hypothesis. The second one is that, if the first one is positive, then after one semester's instruction, whether the students can use these activities in their independent reading effectively. In the study, one class was chosen as the experimental group while the other the control group. Before the experiment, they were asked to do one reading comprehension test and answer the pre-questionnaire about their situation on pre-reading activities. During the experiment, both classes received the same instruction, with the exception of the use of pre-reading activities in the experimental group. At the end of the experiment they were given the post-test and the experimental group answered the post questionnaire. Also some students were interviewed about their impressions and thoughts of the pre-reading activities covered during the term. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used in this experimental study. At last, the results of the tests and questionnaires were analyzed on computer.The results show proper pre-reading activities do have good effects on students' reading comprehension and that teachers, by designing and carrying out adequate and purposeful pre-reading activities in every reading class, can not only help students improve their reading comprehension by degrees, but also make them become more confident and active readers.