Study On The Application Of Schema Theory To English Reading Teaching In High School

Reading is one of the most significant abilities to acquire information in the process of knowledge acquisition.Under exam-oriented education,English-reading teaching in many high schools still focuses on translation and explanation about grammar rules but ignores the activation and consolidation of students’ schema.Students can’t fully understand the implication about content without the support of relevant background information.However,schema-theory oriented reading teaching provides lots of relevant background information and connects existed schema in readers’ mind with reading materials.It can make up for the deficiencies of current reading teaching and help students to fully understand the implication about content.Finally,students’ cultural awareness and emotional attitude can be cultivated.In this paper,a questionnaire designed on the basis of China’ s Standards of English Language Ability was used to analyze the current situation of students’ English reading ability in Yongfeng Second High School from three dimensions:self-assessment of English reading,English reading modes and English reading difficulties.English reading teaching experiments were carried out in two classes of Grade two in high school.Fifty students(18 girls and 32 boys)coming from the Class15 form the EC and CC students are from Class 10(29 girls and 21 boys).From the pre-test result,sig=0.716>0.05,there is no significant difference between CC and EC.They are on the similar levels of English reading ability.In the whole process of reading linguistic schema,form and content schema are introduced thoroughly pre-reading,while-reading and post-reading.Quantitative analyses were conducted to analyze scores of pre-test and post-test about English reading comprehension in EC and CC by SPSS.This paper aims to examine the effect of schema-theory oriented English-reading teaching on improving students’ English reading ability and learning interest.The significant increase in reading interest and the improved-scores of questions involving reorganization,reinterpretation and inferences indicated that the use of schema theory teaching strategies has a positive impact on students’ interest and reading ability.It can be seen from the research results that the proposed research hypothesis that schema theory has certain effect on improving students’ English reading scores and learning interest is true.In addition,some practical and feasible schema-basedEnglish-reading teaching strategies are concluded based on the research hypothesis,such as,activate schema before reading by inputting background information or predicting main idea through title;While reading,construct the language,form and content schema;Finally,consolidate and make use of the new schema through role-playing and text continuation.