An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Schema Theory-Based English Reading Teaching In Senior High Schools

Reading is a kind of complex intelligent process by which we gain information through the written form and reading is also a psychological process that obtains the sense of words and the meaning of reading materials through written form. According to English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School, goals of English reading teaching in senior high schools is to cultivate the students' reading strategies, develop students' sense of English and give extraordinary importance and attention to the cultivation of acquiring information and dealing with information during the process of reading.Schema theory, which derived from the field of psychology, is the study of psychological organization for storing and retrieving readers, existing knowledge while acquiring or dealing with the new information. As an influential theory on reading teaching, schema theory has been applied in EFL learning, giving senior high school teachers a lot of enlightenment in English reading teaching.Considering the unpleasant situation of English reading in the school, the author tries to find out whether it is useful to instruct English reading teaching based on schema theory, the author conducted a 3-months experiment among students from two classes that she has currently been teaching in attempt to solve the following two questions:1) Can English reading teaching based on Schema-theory contribute to improving participants' reading ability(measured by the reading performance); 2) Can the English reading teaching based on Schema-theory help to enhance participants' scores on different reading question types(main idea, reasoning judgment, word meaning, detail question). All together 120 students from Class 13(the controlled class) and class 15(the experimental class) in Senior 3 of Gaoyao No.1 middle school actively participated in the present experiment.Before the experiment, a questionnaire and a pre-test were performed in both groups to get to know students' English reading learning situation and to test students' reading performance. During the 3-month experiment, Schema-theory based instruction was strictly instructed in the Experimental class: activate schema in pre-reading, develop schema while reading and consolidate schema in post-reading. While a traditional teaching approach was implemented in the control class, translating the whole passage sentence by sentence.After the experiment, a post-test were respectively carried out in both the control class and the experimental class. On the basis of the result analysis of the two reading comprehension test scores, the author can get some hints:English reading teaching based on Schema-theory can help students expand their scope of knowledge to improve their reading ability and promote students' various reading question types' scores. The application of Schema-theory to English reading teaching should be student-centered to activate students' original background knowledge. The schema construction in teaching should be based on the reading materials and use language output in post-reading to consolidate students' knowledge schema. In Senior English reading teaching process, there is a great need to help students activate, enrich and construct cultural schema in their mind, and more stresses should be laid on these schemas which are different from their own culture. It is hoped that this study will shed light on English reading teaching in rural middle schools.