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

Reading plays an important role in the four skills which include listening,speaking,reading and writing in foreign language learning.Reading which is one of the main ways to help students learn languages,has become an inseparable way for students to acquire information.Reading ability is also an important way to evaluate learning skills of a language learner.To a certain extent,learners’ English reading ability can represent their English level.The English curriculum standard for senior high school emphasizes helping students to establish a sense of community of human destiny and multi-cultural awareness.It attaches importance to opening student’s international view,appreciating outstanding culture at home and abroad,and cultivating student’s diversified thinking and divergent thinking.However,due to the influence of the exam oriented education,in the actual teaching,teachers still adopt a "graffiti" teaching method,and students have not paid enough attention.With teachers unfamiliar with teaching concept and lacking teaching method,most students’ reading situation has not achieved good results.With the development of students’ cognitive ability,the traditional reading teaching method can not develop students’ overall quality well.In recent years,there is a big difference in the college entrance examination grades in urban area,and the reading level of students vary from person to person.So the schema theory is applied in teaching reading in the paper whose purpose is to change the present status of students’ passive learning,their attitude towards learning English,and make students become the real "owner" in the classroom.The problems discussed in this study are as follows;1.Can the teaching of English reading based on schema theory improve students’ interest in reading?2.Can the English reading teaching based on schema theory improve students’ reading performance?In this study,the subjects are chosen from a high school in Fuyang.In the experimental class,the author uses the English reading teaching based on schema theory.The grammar-translation method is applied in the control class.The results show that:(1)The reading teaching method which is based on schema theory,can arouse students’ interest in learning language and cultivate students to have a positive attitude to learning in senior high school.they have learned a lot of strategies when reading whose habits and confidence have also changed a lot.It makes English reading teaching in senior high school more interesting than before.(2)After a term of experiment,the author find that the experimental class’ s grade is apparently higher than that of the control class,and there is a significant difference,which shows that English reading teaching based on the schema theory can more effectively improve students’ academic performance and reading interest than the traditional teaching method.Based on the above findings,it’s suggested that teachers in senior high school when reading teaching,should help students to establish language schema,enrich content schema and develop formal schema.With teachers’ help,Students’ interest in reading should be cultivated,and they are able to fully understand the reading materials and read them efficiently.Certainly,there are some limitations in this study,for example,the experimental period is not long and sample size is not large.