The Application Of Schema Theory To English Reading Teaching In High Schools

In English learning, reading is an effective way to acquire a variety of knowledgeand improve all the other language skills. Reading is one of the most importantlanguage skills as well as learning strategies which are the basis to develop otherlanguage skills. How to teach reading plays a crucial part in language teaching, hence,effective teaching is the key to enhancing the quality of teaching. However, thetraditional reading teaching method is inefficient. So a number of researchers andscholars have been finding out the best way of EFL teaching. Over the past decades, theresearchers and scholars have been making great achievements by applying schematheory to EFL teaching, especially reading teaching.Schema consists of a series of network including numbers of facts and conceptsthat are stored in people’s long-term memory. It is a frame that facilitates learners’ability to absorb new items. Schema is clarified into three kinds: linguistic schema,content schema and formal schema.This thesis aims at studying the application of schema theory on EFL in seniorhigh schools in order to prove the effectiveness on students’ reading scores. The specificmethod is to choose two parallel classes in Grade One of He Jing High School. One iscontrolled class where traditional teaching model is used, while the other is experimental class in which reading teaching is conducted under the guidance ofschema theory. In order to enrich students’ linguistic schema in the experimental class,the author employs three specific approaches to enlarge their vocabulary as well ascultivate students’ ability to analyze long and complicated sentences. Meanwhile,students are encouraged to read various extracurricular reading materials to activate andenrich their content schema and formal schema. In the stages of pre-reading,while-reading and post-reading, different activities are applied such as question-answermethod, discussion in group, predicting content of text, skimming and scanning and soon to activate and enrich students’ linguistic schemata, content schemata and formalschemata. After three months, the teacher will collect the results of readingcomprehension tests contrasting to the former data and analyze them with the aid ofSPSS. Also, the author will have an informal interview with some students fromexperimental class at the end of the term to demonstrate the changes in students’interests, attitudes, confidence and so on. Then the author will put forward somesuggestions on the basis of previous experiment as well as the analysis of collectedresults. In addition, the limitations of this experiment will be pointed out.