An Experimental Study Of The Application Of Schema Theory To College English Reading Teaching

The importance of English reading in college English teaching has made the applicationof effective teaching method to improve students’ reading comprehension become theteachers’ great concern for a long time. Since1970s, the linguists at home and abroad haveput forward the idea of applying schema theory in reading process. They believe that it caneffectively improve students’ reading comprehension to integrate readers’ backgroundknowledge and their prior experience with the reading material.This study was conducted under the guidance of the schema theory and based on thetextbook (New Horizon College English (Second Edition) Book1). The author investigatedthe effectiveness of using schema theory in the teaching of college English reading with acombination of descriptive qualitative and quantitative methods: a questionnaire, anexperimental teaching practice and an interview after the experiment. The experiment lastedfor sixteen weeks and it was conducted upon80freshmen in two groups with different levelsof English proficiency, and each group consisted of two level-based classes in QiqiharUniversity. In each group, one class, which was taught with the traditionalgrammar-translation teaching method, was treated as the control class and the other class,which was taught with the schema-oriented methods, was adopted as the experimental class.During the experimental period, the teacher took advantage of different schemata to teachstudents based on the same selected reading materials. For linguistic schema, the teacherfocused on the teaching of vocabulary and syntax knowledge so as to improve students’ability of guessing the meaning of the new words in the context and their ability of analyzingthe syntactic structure of the complex sentences. For content schema, the experiment helpedstudents to predict the text content through analyzing the key words and the topic sentences,and encouraged them to compare the culture differences between China and some foreigncounties to help them to store up rich background knowledge. Brainstorming, questioning andgroup discussion could broaden students’ horizon and encourage them to deepen theirunderstanding of the whole texts. For formal schema, to analyze the different writing stylesand features of different reading material, so as to help students to become familiar with thestructure, the organization and the main idea of the text and to accumulate rich formalschemata.To testify the effectiveness of schema-oriented teaching method on improving students’reading comprehension, a questionnaire is conducted at first to learn students’ attitude to theircollege English reading teaching before the experiment. Then, a pre-test was carried out to measure the subjects’ level of reading comprehension in order to ensure the students of theexperimental classes and the control classes in group A and group B were almost on the samelevel. After the sixteen-week experiment, the author carried out a post-test to measurestudents’ level of reading comprehension of the experimental classes and the control classesin group A and Group B. The author collected the data and analyzed it. The data for group Ashowed a significant difference between the experimental classes and the control class. Onethe contrary, the data for group B did not show an obvious difference between theexperimental classes and the control class. After the experimental teaching, through theinterview to student representatives, the author found that the subjects from the experimentalclass in group A believed that they had developed great interest in college English readingclasses. They thought the sixteen-week learning in reading classes improved their readingcomprehension to a large extent. However, the subjects from the experimental class in groupB believed that the progress they had made in college English reading classes is not enough.They thought there was no obvious effect for the sixteen-week learning in reading classes tohelp them to improve their reading comprehension. The analysis and discussion were madebased on all the results, and the author proposed some suggestions for future college Englishreading teaching. Meanwhile, the author also put forward the limitations of the study and thesuggestions for further study.