Application Of Schema Theory To The Teaching Of College English Reading

With the development of second language acquisition, English reading has caused great attention by many people, especially English teachers. Listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating are five basic and interrelated skills in English teaching, while reading is an important way by which students acquire information. Under the influence of traditional teaching methods, some teachers'wrong ideas lead to the students'weakness on reading learning. So how to use effective teaching methods to cultivate and improve students'reading ability becomes a hot problem.Reading theory had undergone dramatic change under the influence of psychology, linguistics, and psycholinguistics during the past 25 years. In the early 1960s, scholars as D.Labergern and S.T.Samuels thought reading was a rather passive decoding process which was known as Bottom-Up; from late 1960s to early 1970s, scholars as Goodman,K.S. thought reading was an "active psycholinguistic guessing game", a Top-Down process; later, Rumelhart, D.E. proposed reading was interactive. Regardless of the process as "Bottom-Up", "Top-Down" or "Interactive", the readers or students can not have a basic comprehension without their schematic knowledge. So it is the readers'schematic knowledge and linguistic knowledge that make the readers comprehend the meaning of the text.Any material, spoken or written, does not convey meaning by itself, it only generates meaning under the combination with readers'background knowledge, such as linguistic knowledge, social knowledge, cultural knowledge, common senses, etc. Understanding a text is an interactive process between readers'background knowledge and the text.Schema theory is the foundation of my thesis. It discusses how to use it in EFL reading and how to improve students'reading ability. The author do not study the theory itself, but see the influence it brings to the students. Firstly, the thesis makes a statement on the background and significance of the research. Chapter one introduces the current research of the development of schema theory in guiding reading at home and abroad and the existed problems in reading teaching. Then the introduction of the definition, classification of the schema theory. During the process of experiment, the author divide students into two classes: experimental class and controlled class. They are Non-English major freshmen from CCUT SOFT. Adopting pre-test and post-test to see whether the subjects are on the same level. Using SPSS software to analyze the result. The author also uses questionnaire to see the students'application of three types of schemata in reading process. In view of the experimental result, we can see that applying schema theory to college English reading teaching is very necessary and good to students. So in class, the teacher should choose all kinds of means to improve students'reading ability, such as, pre-reading activities, analogy, experience sharing, semantic mapping, discussion, lectures and visual aids and so on. For college English teachers, an important task is to help students build more new schemata and adopt some effective ways to stimulate and activate students'relevant schemata, helping students combine the existed background knowledge with the reading information.