On The Application Of Schema Theory To The Teaching Of English Reading For Self-taught Students

Schema Theory, as a new reading teaching theory, emphasizes the function ofthe existing various empirical knowledge in the readers’minds to the readingprocess. During the process of teaching the English course for self-taught students inthe vocational school, in view of the actual situation of the students’lack ofvocabulary, reading skills and the absence of the reading strategies, the author triesto use Schema Theory to guide reading in reading class.First, students are offered a reading comprehension for a pretest, to test theirlanguage ability. And then the Interview is taken advantage of to deeply analyze andacknowledge which reading techniques and how frequently the students use. Second,analyze the ten recent English self-taught examinations, and a comparison betweenthe examination and the teaching materials is made to sum up4types of themeswhich frequently appear——social problems, scientific essays, storytelling andeducation problems. According to these four themes, the paper studies what schemaare involved, and designs special teaching steps, as to fully mix the schema theoryinto reading as a guider. Finally the students are given a reading comprehension for aposttest. On basis of the actual data, it is observed and analyzed whether readingability of the students is improved.The analysis intends to give the priority to students that let students themselvesbuild all sorts of schemata in reading process so that they can integrate the two waysof top-down and bottom-up methods to understand and process information, whichcan help them to draw on the strong points of others to make up for their own weakpoints and improve their reading ability.At the same time, the impacts are also compared on the reading processbetween the Schema Theory and the traditional grammar translation method in theempirical research in the hopes of proving the following two points:1. Whether it is more efficient or not for the students to apply schema theory toguide the reading.2. After learning the schema theory, Whether the students have consciousness or not to build schemata themselves and to use reading strategies.It is demonstrated that the students’reading ability is developed efficientlyand apparently. They can actively structure any kind of schema——strengthen thebasis, absorb the background information and hold the basic framework of thearticles.