Research On Current Situation And Strategies Of College English Reading Teaching Based On Schema Theory

In college English teaching, the cultivation of English reading ability has been one of thecore objectives. Whether we can succeed in cultivating English reading ability of collegestudents depends greatly on teaching strategies. However, the effect of the current collegeEnglish reading teaching is far from satisfying. It is necessary to explore effective teachingstrategies in order to improve the current situation of college English reading teaching and theEnglish reading ability of college students.Applying schema theory to process the new information is a reading model which iscalled interactive model. It avoids the defects of the bottom-up model which regards thereading comprehension as the word decoding process and neglects the reader’s psychologicalprocess. At the same time, it makes up for the deficiencies of the top-down model whichregards the reading comprehension as the psychological guessing game and ignores thereader’s basic linguistic knowledge. Utilizing schema theory to guide college English readingteaching plays a crucial role in understanding the gist, the content and the outline of the text,and best effect can be achieved in reading teaching.Starting from investigating the current situation of college English reading and throughanalyzing the interviews with teachers about college English reading teaching and thequestionnaires on students about college English reading learning, it is found out that thereexist some problems in the current college English reading teaching and learning: in readingclasses, college English teachers tend to use grammar－vocabulary－centered model;although most teachers assign the extracurricular reading task, the completion of the resultsare far from satisfying; as to the relevant background knowledge, teachers seldom encouragestudents to know well before class; reading skills and strategies are not explained and trainedsystematically and the genre of the text are not introduced. Meanwhile, there are problems inthe students’ learning English reading: they are short of linguistic knowledge, culturalbackground knowledge and writing style knowledge. Based on schema theory, this researchattempts to explore effective teaching strategies in order to improve the current situation ofcollege English reading teaching, such as activating students’ relevant schemata of thediscourse, instructing linguistic knowledge in different ways and expanding students’ relevantbackground knowledge of the discourse. Besides, these teaching strategies include cultivatingthe students’ reading strategies and skills, teaching ways of discourse structure analysis and adopting interactive teaching in reading classroom. To some extent, the results of thisresearch will provide reference for improving college English reading teaching.