A Study Of The Effectiveness Of Applying The Schema Theory To English Reading Teaching In The Junior Middle School

With the increasingly accelerated globalization and rapid development ofinformation technology, learning English is undoubtedly important. As a basic skill,reading is one of the important ways to learn English. In order to meet the needs oflanguage learning, students must improve their English reading ability and train theirreading skills. However, at present, heavily influenced by traditional teaching methods,teachers still emphasize the teaching of vocabulary, grammar and sentence patterns,but neglect students’ accumulation and usage of schema knowledge, thereby causingthe low efficiency of foreign language teaching and reading teaching and students’poor performance in reading comprehension. In this paper, the author analyzes thecurrent situation and the existing problems of English reading teaching, elaborates onthe necessity of applying schema theory to guide English reading teaching, and raisestudent’s awareness of using reading strategies with by adopting new reading teachingmethods under the guidance of schema theory so as to, help students to furtherunderstand the nature of reading and grasp reading skills and thus effectively improvetheir English reading ability.This study adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods, and60students ofgrade3from a Qingdao Junior Middle School were asked to take an EffectivenessExperiment Research under the guidance of the Schema Theory. The study mainlyanswers three questions:1. Can schema theory improve students’ reading ability injunior middle school?2. Is reading more effective when the reader possesses more related schemata?3. How can teachers practice schema theory in junior middle schoolEnglish teaching?The questionnaire applied in the study includes the following three aspects:1. TheEnglish learning situation of respondents;2. The students’ interests, attitude andstrategies of English reading;3. The students’ attitude towards English readingteaching methods.The reading strategy in the study is reflected by using different reading methodsaccording to different stages, reading purposes, and reading subjects. In readingteaching of experimental class, the author adopts the strategy of combining intensivereading with extensive reading. Based on the comparison of the pre-experiment resultsand post-experiment results of the experiment class and control class, three findingsare concluded:1. Schema theory is beneficial for the improvement of students’readingability, plays a key role in promoting students’ capacity of generalization and theirabstract thinking ability, and is also conducive to cultivating students’ autonomouslearning ability and comprehensive ability to use the language.2. The guidance andtraining of language schema, content schema and formal schema in the experimentalclass has brought positive effects on the students’ reading level, so, the more relatedschemata are possessed, the more effective is reading3. Schema theory can be used inthe whole process of English reading teaching in junior middle school. During theprocess, students can activate schema before reading, set up schema while reading, andconsolidate schema after reading.Finally, on the basis of data analysis and discussion, the author puts forward somesuggestions for English reading teaching, such as changing traditional teachingmethods to enable teachers to play the leading role, correcting students’ learningmotivation from “to be made to learn” to “to learn”, strengthening students’consciousness of reading strategies to improve their reading comprehension ability,...