Application Of Schema Theory To English Major Student’s Reading Comprehension

English reading plays an important part in English courses. Students can obtain new knowledge,Vocabulary and grammar in their reading process. They need to read large amounts of English materials toobtain new knowledge, the accumulation of a large vocabulary, grammar proficiency, and then try todevelop their English writing skills and speaking ability. So English teachers have studied to explore thatthe use of effective teaching methods to help students improve their reading ability. To what degree will theapplication of schema theory influence English major students’ reading comprehension?This study is guided by the schema theory, combining with the assigned textbook A New EnglishCourse Book I. The author uses the research methods of the reading tests, questionnaires and individualinterviews to prove that schema theory has effect on English majors’ reading comprehension. During theexperiment, for the selected reading materials, the author uses linguistic schema, content schema andformal schema to teach students. The author researches the effort of the three schemata on students’ readingcomprehension, in order to analyze whether the content schema has more significant influence on students’reading comprehension, and explain why background knowledge plays an important role in students’reading process. How the teachers apply schema theory to reading class, and then improve students’reading ability.The experimental result shows that applying schema theory to college English reading teaching is verynecessary and good for students. So in reading class, teachers should choose all kinds of means to improvestudents’ reading ability, such as, pre-reading activities, experience sharing, semantic mapping, discussion,lectures and visual aids and so on. For college English teachers, an important task is to help students buildmore new schemata and adopt some effective ways to stimulate and activate students’ relevant schemata,helping students combine the existed background knowledge with the reading information.