A Study Of The Application Of Cultural Schema Theory In English Reading Comprehension Teaching In Senior High School

English reading comprehension in English teaching has occupied a very important position, so how to improve the efficiency of English reading comprehension has always been the thought problems in foreign language teaching. Reading is one of the most direct ways to access information for students, so adopting effective learning strategies of reading not only can help students improve the efficiency of reading, but also can have a profound impact for their English learning in the future. However, under the influence of the traditional teaching method, teachers still pay more attention to words, sentences and grammar knowledge then translate the whole reading material sentence by sentence, rather than training students’ reading skills, which causes the lack of the corresponding schema knowledge, especially the cultural schemata. Therefore, students have many problems in reading comprehension.British psychologist Frederic Charles Bartlett(1932) puts forward schema theory and claims that consciousness and memory are led by people’s mental space schemata which explain the process of construction of an incident. He also states that schema is the reflection of the past experience or the positive organization of the experience. Cultural schema theory is a sub-class theory of the schema theory. It emphasizes that the accumulation of the cultural background knowledge related to the reading materials effects on the efficiency of reading comprehension. And the author has read a variety of reading literature at home and abroad in recent years, and finds out that the use of cultural schema theory to guide English teaching has become a major research trend. The author, through questionnaire survey and teaching experiment, tries to find an effective teaching method on English reading comprehension in senior high school. The new teaching method based on cultural schema theory is used for improving the effectiveness of reading comprehension and the reading abilities of students in senior high school. And on this basis, three questions are to be solved in the present thesis: firstly, what are the main problems in English reading comprehension teaching in senior high school? Secondly, what are the potential measures based on cultural schema theory to improve the efficiency of English reading comprehension in senior high school? Thirdly, how is the effectiveness of English reading comprehension teaching in senior high school under the guidance of cultural schema theory?The present thesis has got three main findings: 1. The current major problems are the shortage of relevant cultural background knowledge, reading interests and reading strategies for students in senior high school. 2. The reading strategies based on cultural schema theory mainly include three aspects: pre-reading activities, while-reading activities and post-reading activities. Pre-reading activities help students activate their existing related cultural schema knowledge; while-reading activities help students enrich and construct new cultural schema knowledge; post-reading activities help students consolidate and expand their storage of cultural schema knowledge. 3. The new teaching method based on cultural schema theory has significant effect on English reading comprehension teaching in senior high school.The thesis is made up of six chapters. Chapter one is an introduction to the study. It briefly points out research background, purpose and significance of the study, research questions, and the layout of the thesis. The second chapter is the literature review, which reviews the researches on cultural schema theory abroad and at home. The third chapter is the theoretical framework, which introduces reading theory and cultural schema theory. The fourth chapter is the research design. In order to verify the influence of cultural schema theory in English reading comprehension teaching, this thesis designs a teaching experiment under the guidance of cultural schema theory. The fifth chapter is the analysis of data through the results of questionnaire, pre-test and post-test. Compared with the comparison group by traditional teaching approach, the reading ability of the experimental group taught by the new teaching approach based on cultural schema theory is improved obviously. And the last chapter is the conclusion of this thesis, which gives the major findings, implications, limitations and suggestions for further study.