The Application Of Cultural Schemata In English Reading Teaching In Junior Middle Schools

Reading is an important skill for English learners. Recently, more and moreimportance is attached to the training of reading comprehension and the role ofreading in English teaching is widely recognized. However, the traditional Englishreading teaching is grammar-oriented and teachers just explain the passage word byword, neglecting the training of reading skills, ignoring the importance of backgroundknowledge. As a result, students meet with many difficulties in readingcomprehension.The schema theory, especially the cultural schema theory plays a very importantrole in English reading teaching. As Cook says, the mind that is stimulated by somekey words or phrases in the texts or by the contexts could activate a knowledgeschema. Cook implies that we were not necessarily dealing with the consciousprocesses, but rather with the automatic cognitive response that were given to theexternal stimuli.The existing cultural schema can help readers better understand reading materialsand make predictions during the reading process. Therefore，teachers should helpstudents to activate their existing cultural schema or construct new ones during thereading teaching process. To testify the effectiveness of cultural schemata, anexperiment is conducted in a middle school. The study has tested the application ofcultural schemata to English reading teaching. Several research methods are applied,including questionnaires and tests. In addition, the research aims to explore how totrain students in English reading comprehension with the cultural schemata theory. Allthe data were analyzed by SPSS 19.0. The study proves the effectiveness of thecultural schema theory in English reading teaching in junior middle schools throughthe experiment and also tries to put forward some useful suggestions for Englishreading teaching.