The Influences Of Schema Theory On High School Students’ English Reading

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four basic skills forEFL learners. Among the four basic skills, reading is the most importantskill to master one language. Therefore, it is necessary and meaningfulfor students to improve their reading ability. Through scholars’ constanteffort, schema theory comes into being and provides a new perspectivefor reading study.Based on schema theory, the thesis aims to find out the influence ofthree schema variables on English reading; That is to say, the thesis aimsto find out the relationship between the vocabularies（linguistic schema）,background knowledge (content schema), text structure knowledge（formal schema）and reading ability by an experiment in Gaotai HighSchool, Nanzheng County, Hanzhong city, Shaanxi provience. Throughthe experiment, we get vocabulary scores, background knowledge scores,text structure scores and reading scores of61students step by step.Through the methods of correlation analysis and ANOVA analysis, wemake conclusions:(1) there is a positive relation between vocabulary andreading ability;(2) there is positive relation between backgroundknowledge and reading ability;(3) there is no positive relation betweentext structure knowledge and reading ability;(4) vocabulary and background knowledge have similar contributions to reading ability andtext structure knowledge affects reading ability in another way. Aftermastering vocabulary and background knowledge, text structure comesinto play. Finally, some useful methods will be given to students in orderto improve their reading ability.