A Comparative Evaluation Of The Reading Parts In College English Textbooks From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

Schema theory has been widely applied in multi-aspects of English languageteaching, but has been less applied in the evaluation of English reading materials.This paper aims to conduct a comparative evaluation of the reading parts designbetween New College English (Second Edition) Integrated Course Student’s Book(NEC) and Experiencing English Integrated Coursebook (Second Edition)(EEIC) toexplore the application and embodiment of schema theory in the two textbooksthrough the following research questions:(1) Are the pre-reading activities in NECand EEIC designed to help activate reader’s relevant schema before reading? If yes,in what ways respectively and what are their similarities and differences?(2) Do theselection and organization of reading texts in NEC and EEIC conform to schematheory and contribute to enriching reader’s schema? If yes, in what ways and whatare their similarities and differences?(3) Are reading exercises designed to practicestudents’ relevant schema and reading skills? If yes, in what ways respectively andwhat are their similarities and differences?(4) What are the implications of thisstudy for the compilation of college English reading materials?This paper takes linguistic schema, content schema and formal schema (Carrell&Eisterhold,1983) as the theoretical basis, and aims to explore the similarities anddifferences of the two textbooks in the application and embodiment of schema theorythrough a comparative analysis and questionnaire survey from the three dimensionsof pre-reading activities, reading text and post-reading exercises. And the dataanalysis and questionnaire survey come to the following main discoveries:1. In the pre-reading activities, NEC mainly presents a brief overview and alistening task while EEIC has vivid pictures, practical communicative dialogue, freediscussion and listening task in pre-reading activities. Both textbooks are similar intheir pre-reading activities of the facilitating function in later understanding ofsubsequent reading text, as well as deficiencies in the diversification of pre-readingactivity forms;2. EEIC’s text is of higher reading difficulty than that of NEC, and the internaltext sequence and organization are better realized in NEC while the overall difficultyprogression is more obvious through book levels in EEIC; EEIC has obtained morediversified topics and genres of reading text and is as well more balancedlydistributed through units than NEC. NEC and EEIC share the common advantages of full coverage of various topics and the cultural elements in reading text. However,EEIC is better than NEC in text authenticity, readability progression and modern andfresh topic, and diversified reading purposes of reading texts. But EEIC should beimproved in its new words and grammatical rules of the role in linking with students’previous knowledge. And NEC is weak in illustration and text authenticity;3. Both books tend to focus on similar exercise forms and content with NECemphasizes text structure and large exercise amount while EEIC has concerned withquestion types of subjective response. But EEIC is better than NEC in exercisedifficulty and amount.Therefore, both textbooks have achieved fairly good realization of contentschema. And EEIC complies comparatively better with formal schema than NEC.But in EEIC, linguistic schema still remains the factor to be improved in itspresentation of new words and grammatical rules. The questionnaire survey resultsprove that generally EEIC is better designed than NEC.Based on the research results, this paper believes that linguistic schema, contentschema and formal schema should be attached greater importance in the compilationof college English reading materials in the future.