A Study On Content Schema And Its Correlation With EFL Reading Comprehension

The concept of schema could be traced back to the era of Plato and Aristotle, when the schema was considered as fixed templates and the theory of schema was not systematized. In 18th century, Kant expressed his idea about schema from a philosophical point of view. He argued: a schema was a bridge between percepts and concepts. During 1930s, the British famous psychologist Bartlett found that schemas should be viewed as cultural constructs in memory; they were more than in-the-head phenomena. With the development of cognitive science, many researchers tended to apply schema theories into reading comprehension, the tendency of which gained prominence during 1970s. However, the field shifted as researchers increasingly used sociocultural theories, particularly the work of L. S. Vygotsky, to frame investigations of literacy process. Because many researchers had noticed that traditional schema theories, with some limitations, could not perfectly account for the literacy process. Yet the sociocultural perspectives could not, either. Hence, the scientists from both sides intended to blur the boundaries that have traditionally separated schema theoretic perspectives and research and from sociocultural perspectives and research. Situated in sociocultural environment, schemas should be considered as embodied and a dynamic cultural process, not just collections of mental processes. Noticing that, many reading researchers proposed schema theory as a useful model of reading comprehension to facilitate people's reading comprehension, both for L1 and L2 learning.In this thesis, based on the general discussions on the development of schema theory and its application in reading process, the author intended to investigate whether there is a positive correlation of content schema with EFL reading comprehension. Through a small experiment conducted on the English-major students from Fushun Teachers College, some data would be collected and analyzed to investigate whether the students'performance in content-familiar test has significant difference from that in content-unfamiliar one; whether there is a similar orientation on the performance among the students of different English proficiency.The findings show that higher-proficiency students'performance in content-familiar test outperformed what they did in content-unfamiliar one; similar situation existed among lower-proficiency students. In conclusion, despite the English proficiency, the content schema facilitates students'reading comprehension, which proves that the degree of familiarity towards content has a positive correlation with EFL reading comprehension. Making use of content schema, the students'reading level could be improved by modifying the teaching method.