The Comprehension Of English Poetry From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

Cognitive linguistics develops rapidly in recent years. It emphasizes theimportance of human cognition in the process of language learning and use, andregards cognitive competence as the foundation of human’s acquiring knowledge.Schema theory is the product of cognitive linguistics and psychology. Though theconcept was proposed as early as1872by Kant, a German philosopher, it did notattract much attention by scholars because of the development of other theories suchas behaviorism. Since1960s, with the development of computer science andlinguistics, schema theory came into the vision of researchers again and attractedmore and more attention of them. It developed quickly since then and when it came to1980s, psychologists began to study the application of schema theory in foreignlanguage learning. They used schema theory to explain the mantle process of foreignlanguage teaching and learning especially in the field of reading comprehension, andformed schema reading theory. This theory combines human being’s existingknowledge and experience with linguistic structure, and provides a new idea for textcomprehension.Poetry is a special form of literature and also a crucial, necessary part of readingcomprehension. English poetry is an important part of English learning. When onereads an English poem, he could rich his aesthetic experience and also understandsmore western culture; it also has a very high demand of readers’ reading skill. Whileformer studies about poetry comprehension were mostly from the perspective of thetexts themselves and emphasizes the information provides by the text, they definedpoetry reading as a one-way process which ignored the readers’ knowledge structureand their linguistic competence. Theories of such kind were unfavorable forimproving positivity and efficiency of poetry reading, and readers could not form asystematic poetry study system. Considering the disadvantages of former studies, it isquite necessary to seek a new and systematic way of English poetry comprehension.Based on schema theory and considering the features of poetry texts, this thesisclassifies schemata into linguistic schema, formal schema and content schema, andcultural schema, and makes some analyses about these schemata together with someselected English poems. These analyses not only demonstrates the functions of these schemata but also shows the necessity that readers should constantly improve theirschema, and it is meaningful for readers try to form a systematic English poetryschema.This thesis consists of three parts: an introduction, the main body and aconclusion. The main contents are as follows:The first part is the introduction. This part mainly introduces the development ofschema theory and the current studies about this theory at home and abroad. As thestudy object, studies about poetry text are also introduced here. The paper points outthe importance of schema theory in English poetry comprehension, and offers somesuggestions to English poetry lovers.The second part is the main body of this thesis, which consists of three parts.The first part is literature review. It mainly introduces studies and theories aboutschema theory, poetry texts comprehension and readers’ subjectivity. Schema theorygoes through a long history, and it was first studied in the field of philosophy andpsychology. Later, many scholars made further studies about this theory, andexpanded it into the fields of philosophy, cognitive psychology and artificialintelligence. With the efforts of so many scholars schema theory has been applied ineducation over the past few decades. This part makes detailed explanations about thedefinition, classification and information processing models about schema theory.Poetry is the oldest literary form, and the appreciation about poetry texts has alwaysbeen one of the hottest study objects of scholars. This paper chooses English poetry asthe study object so this chapter makes some introductions about relevant conceptionsand theories about English poetry, and some characteristics about poetry texts are alsointroduced here. Schema theory emphasizes the experience, linguistic knowledgestructure of readers themselves, and also pays attention to the interaction betweenreaders, authors and texts; on the other hand, explanations about poetry texts showinga trend of diversification. All these situations are concerned with theories proposed byWolfgang Iser, Roland Barthe, for instance, the openness of texts, the subjectivity ofreaders, so this thesis makes a brief introduction about the studies in this aspect.Chapter two studies English poetry comprehension in terms of schema theory. Itfirst analyzes functions of schema theory in reading comprehension, which including activating background information and establishing the structure of texts, predictingmeaning and facilitating inferences and so on. The second part is the most importantpart of this entire thesis. Here schemata are classified into linguistic schema, formalschema, content schema and cultural schema, and each of them especially theirfunction are showed by the analysis of English poems. Linguistic schema in poetrycomprehension mainly refers to knowledge structures about vocabulary, sound andfigures of speech. This schema plays a basic role in poetry comprehension. The formsor structures of poems are always closely connected with their genre and content, sothis thesis talks about functions of formal schema and content schema together.Though poetry is different with other literature forms, there are some similarities intheir comprehension, so the analysis here borrows experiences about other kinds ofliterature forms. It is common to see that there are some special printings in poems,such as capitalization, italics and so on, beside these, visual poems, which put thewhole poem into a special shape, are also discussed in this part. Cultural schema playsan important role in English poetry comprehension. Poems often contain many imageswhich have rich cultural connotations, while as to the cultural differences betweenChinese and western countries, the study of these images have always been thesignificant and difficult points in English poetry comprehension. According to Mr.Yuan Xingpei’s theory and poems selected by the author, this thesis classified imagesin English poetry into cultural images, images about social life and religious images.This thesis selects some English poems and analyzes the cultural images in them,which shows the important role of cultural schema in poetry comprehension. Duringthe discussion here, this thesis also makes a brief explanation about the similaritiesand differences about images in Chinese and English poetry.Chapter three makes some further studies about the application of schema theoryin English poetry comprehension. The first part analyzes some reason why readers failto achieve relevant schemata while reading. The second part exemplifies thelimitations of schema theory in texts comprehension. Based on the analysis of theformer part, the third part offers some suggestions about how to build up poetrycomprehension schema and how to apply this schema in teaching English. Forinstance, paying attention to the input of cultural information; strengthening the construction of upper level cognitive structure and so on. It is obvious that cognitivelinguistics is still developing, and as the product of cognitive linguistics schematheory also has some limitations. This part points out that the process of learningEnglish poetry is a complex one and the building up of schemata also requires theactive participation, it is a two-way process: one the one hand, poetry providesabundant knowledge and information for readers; on the other hand, thecomprehension of these poems needs the reader’s cognitive structure, that is theirschema knowledge. Readers could abstract and summarize the rule of poetrycomprehension, and then enrich and improve their existing schemata.The third part is the conclusion, which makes a summary about the whole thesis.With the introduction of theories and analysis of schema theory in English poetrycomprehension, this thesis draws the conclusion that schema theory especiallylinguistic schema, formal schema, content schema and cultural schema could guidethe reader to have a relatively systematic comprehension about English poetry. Thisway of comprehension emphasizes the role of readers and provides a new way forEnglish poetry comprehension. Besides all these above, the analysis of poems alsoshows that the information process models of schema theory, that is, bottom-upprocess and top-down process taking effect in an integrated or an alternative way. Theinadequacies of this thesis are also mentioned in this part.