Application Of Schema Theory In Teaching English Reading In Senior High School

English reading plays an important role in English learning,and English reading instruction is also widely concerned by teachers and learners.For a long time,with the influence of traditional teaching method,some high school English reading teaching still stays in the process of decoding the passage word by word,ignoring the students'mastery of language points,the accumulation of cultural background information and the overall grasp of the structure of the whole passage.This traditional teaching method has made students lose interest in English learning.Students read with little efficiency and poor effects.Therefore,how to help students transform the attitude towards reading,overcome reading difficulties and improve reading comprehension becomes an urgent problem to be solved.In recent years,a lot of domestic and foreign scholars have pointed out the significance of schema theory in reading.Schema theory is divided into three categories:linguistic schema,content schema and formal schema.Linguistic schema refers to the basic knowledge about vocabulary,syntax and grammar.Content schema refers to the background knowledge related to the topic.Formal schema refers to the knowledge about literary genre and text structure.Based on the theory of schema,the author tries to propose a new teaching mode of reading instruction and conduct an empirical study on this mode.The purpose is to help students activate linguistic schema,enrich content schema and improve formal schema so as to improve their English reading comprehension ability.The paper first introduces the concept of reading comprehension and the definition of schema,explains the relationship between schema theory and reading comprehension and expounds the three types of schemata and the effects different schemata have on students' reading comprehension.Then,the author put forward a new mode of teaching English reading based on the reading material—Oxford high school English,which the schema theory is applied to.Before reading,the students are advised to activate their language schema and content schema,get familiar with the relevant vocabulary and sentence patterns,and recall the existing background knowledge to predict the content of the passage.Throughout reading,they need to constantly enrich their language schema,content schema and formal schema step by step,so as to achieve the understanding of the article from the shallower to the deeper.After reading,they are supposed to consolidate the knowledge related to three different schemata,and to improve their reading capacity through different forms of post-reading activities.After that,the author conducted an experimental research in the two classes taught by the author herself.The experimental results show that the English reading achievement of the experimental class is greatly improved compared with the control class.The English reading teaching mode guided by the schema theory is more effective than the traditional reading teaching mode in stimulating students' reading interest,enhancing students'reading skills and improving students' understanding ability.Therefore,in senior high school English reading teaching,teachers should be good at using different methods to help students activate,establish,and consolidate schema knowledge,and guide them to master reading methods and improve reading efficiency,in order to achieve better reading results.