Analysis Of Superior Chinese Newspaper Reading Materials Based On Schema Theory

Newspaper reading is a specific skill course in the whole system of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. It is essential to train senior overseas students about their Chinese reading skills. However, senior overseas students are faced with a lot of learning disabilities due to the specialty and complexity of newspaper language. Thus there is the condition of "difficult to teach and difficult to learn" for the newspaper reading lessons. Besides factors from the teachers and students themselves, I think it is largely due to the current deficiency of superior newspaper reading materials, which is not well meet the needs of the practical teaching. Schema theory is widely used to interpret the psychological process of reading comprehension by foreign language teaching researchers in recent years. This theory can better explain the reading obstacles, and improve your reading ability by mastering a certain number of schema content. At present, Schema theory is rarely used to the study of materials of teaching Chinese as a foreign language in China. Thus in this paper, taking three current typical superior newspaper reading materials for example, the writer analyzed the construction of language schema and content schema with the method of questionnaire investigation, data statistics and charting. The result shows that the schemata content in these teaching materials is not systematic and not complete. So the paper proposed some suggestions about the content arrangement of vocabulary, grammar, exercises, topics, background knowledge in the teaching materials based on the Schema Theory.This paper is divided into five chapters. The Introduction mainly explains the origin and significance of this research. It also includes the research idea, scope, methods and innovation of the paper. Chapter One is the literature review of the related studies. It introduces the current research status of newspapers and textbooks of taking Chinese as a foreign language, the application of schema theory in China and the combination of these two researches. Chapter Two introduces the theoretical basis of this study, the schema theory, and illustrates the significance of building a complete schema for newspaper reading materials. Chapter Three is the key point of this paper. First of all, taking three sets of typical superior newspaper reading materials, and picking out a few representative subjects to analyze concretely about the construction of linguistic schema of representative subjects in new words arrangement, newspapers and sentence arrangement, and exercise arrangement through the way of data statistics. Secondly, the paper made specific statistical analysis to construction of newspapers' content schemata of these three sets of textbooks, respectively from the text content arrangement and background knowledge arrangement. Finally, a conclusion was drawn through comparing the schematism of these three sets of textbooks. Chapter Four revealed the shortage of schematism in current popular newspaper and reading textbooks through former analysis and questionnaires, and proposed some suggestions for compiling of superior newspaper and reading textbooks in vocabulary, grammar, exercises, texts, background knowledge based on the schema theory. I hope superior newspaper reading materials can help students build a complete newspaper schema, and meet the needs of the newspaper reading teaching, and then improve the students' ability of newspaper reading. The last chapter is a conclusion to the whole analysis. It pointed out that the compiling of superior teaching newspaper reading materials should be combined with schema theory, and try to help the students to build a complete newspaper reading schema. Finally, there still exists some deficiencies about this study.