A Study On Schema Theory Application To The Teaching Of English Reading In The Middle School

Teaching English reading has always been an important aspect in middle schools as well as a hard aspect. For a long time, Chinese students reading comprehension skill is quite limited by the traditional way of teaching, and due to the lack of schema the whole teaching process is sentence-based. Therefore, the implement of the Schema Theory to improve the reading comprehension seems to be very important in school students. This paper aims at the practice of the Schema Theory in the hope of guiding English-reading.In this paper, the definition and classifications of the Schema Theory are presented to the readers. The Schemata fall into three categories. They are the linguistic schema, the content schema and the formal schema. And the following part is a brief introduction to reading and the situations of high school students in China.The characters of students in middle schools show great difference in the degrees of extent, developments and activation in terms of the linguistic schema. Most of students hold more linguistic schema than the content schema and the formal schema. Because of the lack of content schema and the missing of training on using schemata in class, students seldom use schema strategies in their reading. In this paper, the author discussed the implication of schema theory on middle school English reading and how to use it.This paper mainly focuses on the application of schema theory in high school English reading teaching. The experiment is taken in the8th Middle School in Dalian Development Zone, which is lasting a semester. More than100students in grade two from two classes took part in the experiment. The author randomly assigned the two classes to an experiment and a control class. The teaching in experimental class is under the direct of schema theory, while in the control class the teaching is directed by grammar translation method. The experiment results show that the background knowledge has a great effect on students’ reading comprehension.Based on the experimental data, the author got the conclusion that the reader can do a well reading only if he/she could use the three kinds of schema together. So, in high school English reading teaching, in order to improve the students’reading competence, the teacher must focus on expanding the linguistic knowledge and enlarging students reading material with different styles.