The Application Of Background Knowledge In English Reading Teaching In Rural Senior School

Reading plays an important role among the four basic skills of English learning.Furthermore, it is an important way in which people acquire knowledge and access toinformation. The New English Curriculum Standards for senior students emphasizesexplicitly on developing students’ reading abilities. Moreover, reading comprehensiontakes the largest part and holds the most scores in the English test paper of UniversityEntrance Examination. But for a long time, much time and energy spent on readingteaching did not fetch the desired results. One reason is that the focus in Englishreading class in rural areas mainly falls on training the students to learn languageknowledge. And teachers stress on teaching language points and syntactic structure.Under the pressure of the college entrance examination, students mainly remembernew words and do simulation training endlessly. Gradually, the students lost interest inreading, which results in poor English. The second reason is that the students in therural middle schools are deficient of certain schemata. Most of the current rural middleschools use the latest teaching materials with the new curriculum standards, whichcharacterized as novel structure, interesting content design, fully English oral training,and vast background knowledge. However, it is rather difficult for those rural studentsto study. Because a lot of the countryside students cannot understand them for theyhave not seen such things. Many scholars and researchers abroad have conducted lotsof extensive research on background knowledge based on schema theory, and theyfind that instructing background knowledge based on the schema theory caneffectively improve students’ reading comprehension. However, in our country theresearch on the relation between background knowledge and English reading is chieflyworked in the university, and this kind of research is rarely done in the rural middleschools. Considering the unpleasant situation of English teaching in the rural middleschool, the author tries to find out whether it is useful to instruct background knowledge based on schema theory in English reading teaching in order to improverural students’ reading comprehension.Through the presentation of the relative theories and the analyses of the resultsfrom the experiment, the paper has verified the effective role that the instruction ofbackground knowledge based on schema theory plays in the process of Englishreading teaching. That is, the instruction of background knowledge based on schematheory is of great value in improving rural students’ English reading comprehension.Therefore, in the process of rural English reading teaching, teachers should try theirbest to help students to build, enrich and activate the content schemata in their minds,especially more stresses should be laid on these schemata which are different fromtheir own culture, in order to improve rural students’ reading ability. It is hoped thatthis study will shed light on English reading teaching in rural middle schools.