An Action Research On English Reading Teaching In Senior High School Based On Schema Theory

English plays a more and more important role in National College Entrance Examination with the publishing of The English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(2017).As an old saying goes,those who do well in English reading comprehension will get good grades in English,from which we know the crucial role reading instruction plays in English language teaching.Consequently,how to arouse student’s interest in reading and how to enhance students’ scores become common topics for English teachers.With the purpose of clearing the obstacles students have when reading,this thesis tries to put up with a new approach to English teaching based on Schema Theory.Schema Theory is a combination of the reading material and readers’ background knowledge.And readers’ reading ability is decided by linguistic schema,content schema and rhetorical schema.Teachers should activate,construct and add new things to students’ schemas during teaching process so as to help them overcome difficulties,thus enhancing their reading ability and grades.This thesis mainly conducted an action research on the effects that Schema Theory has on students’ interest in reading and their reading achievements.It adopts the action research paradigm and takes 52 students in a middle school class as the research object.Using the methods of questionnaire,interview and test paper,this paper aims to study two questions:(1)How can the application of schema theory improve students’ interest in learning English?(2)How can the application of schema theory improve students’ English reading grades?Before the research,students took a test,from which the author could know students’ reading ability.After that,the action research plan was designed,which mainly applied the three schemata of language,form and content to English reading for daily guidance.The first round of the action research was carried out for half a semester,and the students were tested with the same difficult level so that the researcher could understand the effect of the first round of action research.At the same time,the students were interviewed for the researcher to learn the shortcomings of the first round of action research,and then the second round of action research was formulated.After the second round of action research,the students were given a post-test with the same difficulty to find out whether schema theory had improved their grades,and then a questionnaire survey was conducted to find out the students’ interest in English reading.Having compared these results,the author could draw conclusions that:(1)The reading teaching under the guidance of schema theory makes students prefer to pay attention to English materials such as English movies or English books after class,and schema theory encourages students to guess the content of English articles and unfamiliar words,which increases the interest of English learning and can attract students to learn English more spontaneously,so as to improve students’ interest in English reading.(2)Under the guidance of schema theory,students’ knowledge of language schema,content schema and formal schema has increased significantly.They can use more of the three schemata in reading.When facing new reading articles,they can subconsciously activate the three schemata in their brain and use the skills related to schema theory to understand the new reading materials more quickly and deeply.At the same time,the schema theory has greatly improved the students’ reading habits,thus significantly improving the students’ grades.The conclusions of this research have some enlightenment for English teachers.In senior high school,these three schemas should be combined in daily teaching.Linguistic schema can be used to enlarge students’ vocabulary and content schema reminds students to learn more background knowledge.Meanwhile,teachers should attach importance to formal schema to enhance students’ ability to organize the reading contents.Only by combining these three schemas together,can students’ grades be significantly improved.