The Application Of Schema Theory To College Business English Reading Teaching

The main goal of Business English course in college is to improve students’ listening,speaking,reading,writing and translation skills.Among them Business English reading is the most important,which is the key point of Business English Teaching.But Business English reading teaching has a lot of disadvantages on the influence of traditional English teaching method.Many English teachers focus on explaining vocabulary,grammar and sentence patterns in reading materials,but that teaching mode can not reflect the particularity of Business English reading.Also it can not improve students’ ability to use Business English.Schema Theory is a theory of psychology,which refers to the theory of the representation and storage of knowledge organized around a topic.People will make a schema of previous knowledge and experience and apply it to reading while they are reading.So the reading is a process of combining existing schema with reading material.Comparing with traditional teaching method in Business English reading,Schema Theory can improve the students’ Business English reading ability in many aspects,and overcome the disadvantages of traditional teaching method in Business English reading to some extent.Firstly,the author elaborates the theoretical basis of this research and the previous research results.Then,the present situation of Business English reading teaching is analyzed by using the questionnaire.Finally,the validity of Schema Theory is verified through teaching experiments and interviews.The research questions of the thesis are as follows:(1)Can the students’ reading achievement and level of Business English reading be improved effectively by applying Schema Theory to Business English reading teaching in the experimental class?(2)Compared with the traditional grammar-translation teaching method,can the application of Schema Theory in Business English reading teaching improve students’ interests and confidence in English reading more effectively?In this research,the author chooses students from two classes of International Trade Major in Shandong Yingcai University as the research subjects.Before the research,the author lets students of two classes have pre-test,and the result shows that the English level of students of two classes are almost close,which means they can be the research subjects.Before the teaching experiment,students of two classes are asked to do a questionnaire,and the author analyses students’ attitudes of Business English reading by the results of the questionnaire.Then the teaching experiment starts,and lasts for one semester.During the teaching experiment the author uses the traditional teaching method to teach Business English reading in Class One and applies Schema theory to Business English reading to teach students in Class Two.At the end of semester students of two classes are asked to have a post-test,do a questionnaire and have an interview.By using SPSS to analyze the results of the tests,questionnaires and interview,the author proves that the application of Schema Theory can improve students’ ability of Business English reading.So it can be concluded that the application of Schema theory in Business English reading teaching is an efficient teaching method in college.