English Reading Teaching In Senior High School Under The Guidance Of Schema Theory

Reading is seen as one of the major targets in English teaching and learning. It is also an essential requirement in Senior High School English Curriculum Standard (2003). English reading is the most important way for the students in senior high schools to broaden their minds, accumulate vocabulary and grammar knowledge, equip themselves with sentence patterns and improve their writing skills as well. Developing students’reading competence is a top priority of English teaching aims in senior high school.However, the reading ability of many students is not satisfactory. One of the reasons for that is the traditional reading teaching method which is based on grammar translation.Schema includes content schema, linguistic and formal schema. Therefore, the author of this thesis made an attempt to activate, develop and consolidate students’ schema and investigate whether schema-oriented reading teaching is effective in improving students’reading competence. The author carried out an experiment lasting four months’time. Two parallel classes in senior one were chosen. In the experimental class, the author adopted schema-oriented reading teaching, which focused on activating, developing and consolidating students’content schema. While in the control class, the author kept on adopting the traditional way of teaching, which concentrated on the explanation of language points. The teaching model in the experimental class was as follows:pre-reading stage--activating and building schema; while-reading stage--developing schema; post-reading:stage--consolidating schema.The author raised the hypothesis that schema-based reading teaching is effective in developing students’reading competence, at the same time, students have more background knowledge than before and students’awareness of using background knowledge has been improved. According to the data collected through pre-test and post-test, and related questionnaires and interview as well, it can be seen that the hypothesis of this study had been tested to be correct.