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

Reading is an extremely complex and dynamic process of mental activity and information processing,which is a process of constructing new meanings based on the text and the reader’s existing knowledge and experience.The traditional notion of reading ability has been gradually replaced by that of reading literacy over recent years,which includes reading ability and reading character.The discussion of how to improve reading literacy is a hot topic in the foreign language community.Schema is a cognitive model,which is an interdisciplinary product of psychology and cognition,and is now widely used in the field of second language acquisition.This study combines the qualitative research method with the quantitative research method to conduct a four-month experiment with 101 students in two parallel classes(experimental class and control class)in the first grade of a junior high school in a city,in which the experimental class students are taught by the reading teaching based on schema theory and the control class uses the traditional reading teaching method.The changes in students’ reading scores before and after the experiment are investigated by the pre-test and post-test,and the changes in students’ reading character before and after the experiment are investigated from seven perspectives,which are reading method,reading frequency,reading quantity,reading interest,reading motivation,reading attitude and self-assessment.In order to further support the test and questionnaire results,six students are selected from the experimental class to conduct in-depth interviews about the specific changes in students’ reading ability and reading character after the experiment.The results of the study show that students’ reading ability can not only be improved,but also students’ reading character can be perfected after the application of schema theory to the teaching of English reading in junior high school.Most of the students’ reading achievements have improved.The improvement in reading ability is mainly reflected in reading fluency,reading skills and strategies,language knowledge and sociocultural background knowledge,while the improvement in reading character is mainly reflected in reading habits and reading experience,with more obvious changes in reading quantity,reading frequency and reading attitude.However,in the process of reading teaching with the application of schema theory,it is found that schema theory guides the students with good English foundations to effectively guide their reading based on their existing knowledge,and the reading teaching model based on schema theory pays more attention to the thematic context,cultural knowledge and discourse structure,thus promoting the development of students’ reading literacy;for the students with poor English foundations,due to the lack of their own schema background knowledge and the difficulty of the reading material,which leads to a less effective improvement in students’ reading literacy.Therefore,students need to increase the amount of suitable extra-curricular reading to enrich and consolidate the schema,and teachers need to respect students’ schema differences,improve their professionalism and teach at different levels.