A Study On Lexical Approach In Intermediate Chinese Reading Class Based On Schema Theory

International Chinese language teaching has always focused on developing students’ four language skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing,so the reading skills classes have been receiving a lot of attention from educators and scholars.How to improve students’ Chinese reading performance is one of the focal points that international Chinese teachers always explore.It has been found that chunks have both grammatical and lexical characteristics,appear frequently,have relatively fixed forms and meanings,and are memorized,stored and used by students as a whole.Unlike the previous approach,which focused on individual words,the lexical approach uses chunks as the basic unit of instruction and has been used by many language teachers in recent years to teach reading.So far,the lexical approach has attracted more and more attention from researchers and has been proved by many experts and scholars to have positive effects on improving students’ reading performance by introducing chunk theory into Chinese reading instruction,but there are not many empirical studies on how to make students remember and utilize the potential of chunks effectively in reading teaching.Schema theory explains the mental process of foreign language learning and reading in the field of foreign language teaching.Modern schema theory suggests that schema plays an important role in learners’ reading process,and many scholars have found that introducing schema theory into reading research can help students activate,construct,and strengthen schematic knowledge so as to achieve the effect of accelerating students’ processing of textual information.Therefore,this experiment is an attempt to investigate the role of schema theory in lexical approach in the intermediate Chinese reading and whether schema can help students memorize more chunks so that they improve their Chinese reading performance.Based on previous research,the research aims to demonstrate the role of schema theory on the lexical approach,explore its effects on students’ reading grades development,and analyze as well as summarize its implications for reading class.The experiment was conducted in two intermediate classes,one of which was the experimental class and the other was the control class,for a total of four months.The experiment was divided into two phases: the first phase of the control class was taught by the lexical approach based on schema theory,and the control class was taught by the lexical approach separately.In the second phase,the same teaching mode was adopted in both the experimental and control classes,and both classes used the lexical approach based on schema theory to teach intermediate Chinese reading.The experiment used questionnaires,pre-tests and post-tests,interviews with students,and other research methods,and the data were statistically analyzed using SPSS 26.0.The experimental results show:（1）The lexical approach guided by schema theory had positive effects on improving students’ reading scores.Through pre-teaching,after the mid-term reading test,it was found that the reading scores of students in both the experimental and control classes improved to different degrees relative to the pre-experimental period,and the average scores of the experimental class were higher than those of the control class.（2）The schema-based lexical approach helped students activate chunks and expand their chunks reserves more effectively than the lexical approach alone.After the post-test,analysis of the data showed that the post-test scores of both the experimental and control classes after the instructional adjustment had improved again compared with the mid-test,and the average reading score of the experimental class was slightly higher than that of the control class,but the gap between their average scores had narrowed compared with the previous period.