Correlational Study Between Teaching And Learning Strategies In English Reading Classes

For many English learners, reading is the most important one among the four basic skills,which are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The fact is particularly true in the learningprocess of English as a second language or a foreign language. In foreign language teaching,reading skill is always regarded as an important part to test whether students have alreadymastered the English knowledge. Reading is not only a kind of means but also the goal of learningEnglish. Currently, reading occupies large proportion in all kinds of English tests of China, such as,CET-4, CET-6, TEM-4, TEM-8, PETS and so on. However, the traditional teaching method is stilldeeply influencing the present English reading teaching. During the reading teaching, manycollege English teachers just pay attention to the study of vocabulary, grammar and other languageknowledge, and ignore the interpretation and application of schema related to the articles. What ismore, the non-English majors’ English foundation is generally weak and they lack for goodlearning habits and strategies, which leads to their lack of motivation of learning English and theirnegative leaning emotions. All of these will lead to vicious development of non-English majors inboth teaching and learning of English reading. In order to get rid of this time-consuming andinefficient state, teachers should learn to make use of schema to dominate the English readingteaching.Schema is an important achievement of psychological research on memory and lots of expertsand scholars have made in-depth study on this kind of theory. The theory is that the process ofreading comprehension is a dynamic interaction between the input information and the readers’world knowledge in their mind. The theory tries to study the process of foreign language readingteaching by the use of schema, so as to promote the development of foreign language readingteaching. According to numerous relevant study of reading at home and abroad, there are threereading models when reading articles, that is, bottom-up models, top-down models and interactivemodels. Only when the schema is organically combined with three reading models together andcontinuously actives the existing schema in the brain to relate the new information from readingmaterials with the original schema in readers’ brain, can the understanding of the articles be bettercompleted. Therefore, this paper mainly revolves two issues:1. What is the relationship betweenschema theory and college students’ reading strategies and their ability in reading comprehension?2. How do college English teachers improve students’ reading strategies and their ability inreading comprehension by using schema theory in reading class?Based on the summary of the predecessors’ research results and by the way of empiricalresearch, this paper discusses the application of schema in reading teaching strategies of collegestudents and the role of schema in students’ English reading, in order to explore the effective waysto improve the quality of the teaching of college English reading. In this paper, the core of theresearch is the feasibility and practicability of concretization of schema in college English reading teaching. The specific analysis of the application of schema in reading English articles can providesome guidance for this teaching method. The teaching process discussed in this paper is dividedinto three steps,1. Pre-reading: to improve the students’ mastery of article background so as toactive the application of schema;2. While-reading: to improve the ability of analysing the articlebased on schema to infer word meaning, skimming and reading;3. Post-reading: to make thestudents’ quality and accuracy to solve problems reach the ideal level by further analysis of thearticle.The writer selected sixty non-English-major freshmen from the parallel class of ChangchunNew Oriental School. The students are divided into two groups and each group contains thirtystudents. One of the two groups is the experimental group which carries out the English readingteaching based on schema. The other one is the control group which adopts the traditional Englishreading teaching method. In the whole process of empirical research, the writer adopts a pretest,the questionnaire survey and interviews as the research tools, compares the pre-test and post-testresults and analyses the interview data and outcomes, so as to prove the English reading teachingbased on schema is feasible and effective and this kind of teaching method helps to activatestudents’ relevant schemata and improve their ability of reading comprehension. Through theanalysis of the results from students’ interviews, the writer further proves the effectiveness of theteaching method based on schema and the important roles of this kind of teaching method inreading comprehension. And based on the students’ reaction in class, the writer also puts forwardsome suggestions for the class teaching mode. In order to improve the quality of English readingteaching and effectively improve the reading ability of non-English major students, teachers canuse the following ways in their English reading teaching: consolidating and expanding languageschemata and laying foundation for the language; broadening the views of the knowledge;enriching the content schemata; cultivating the ability of analyzing the article subject anddiscourse structure, and enriching the form schemata; using various ways skillfully to activate theexisting schemata; strengthening the guidance of learning method and training reading strategiesand skills; activating the principal role of students and inspiring their English reading motivation.