A Survey On The Current Situation Of Pre-reading Activities In Junior Middle School English Reading Class Under The Framework Of Schema Theory

English reading serves as a bridge for students to obtain language information,cultivate English reading skills,understand western culture and broaden their international horizons,which is an essential aspect of improving students’ English comprehensive ability and plays a very important role in English learning.As the first step of English reading class,pre-reading activities can not only activate students’ original background knowledge and promote students’ mastery of the content of the article,but also stimulate students’ interest and improve classroom participation,playing an important part in improving students’ reading ability.Schema theory also affirms the role of activating students’ related schemas in pre-reading activities in improving students’ reading comprehension ability.Therefore,based on schema theory,this paper investigated 166 junior middle school students and 6 English teachers in Xi’an No.2 Foreign Language School through questionnaires and interview,aiming to find out the current situation and problems of pre-reading activities in junior middle school English reading class.The research results showed that teachers of Xi’an No.2 Foreign language School attached great importance to the development of pre-reading activities,and students also had very positive comments on pre-reading activities,and they agreed with the positive effects of pre-reading activities on English reading class;in actual teaching,teachers and students’ favorite types of pre-reading activities are content-schema-based pre-reading activities,while they did not prefer formal-schema-based pre-reading activities;the overall situation of students’ use of pre-reading strategies were not positive,especially the pre-reading strategies that learn the genre and structure of the text before reading were least frequently used by students.Through research,the author concluded that there were the following problems in the implementation of pre-reading activities: Firstly,teachers lacked the relevant theoretical knowledge of schema and pre-reading activities,and rarely reflected on the design and implementation effect of activities after class,so it was difficult to design effective pre-reading activities.Secondly,the pre-reading activities adopted by teachers in reading class were relatively monotonous and less interesting,and students’ participation was not high.Thirdly,formal-schema-based pre-reading activities were conducive to the improvement of students’ reading comprehension ability,but the fact was that teachers rarely carried out such pre-reading activities in reading class.Finally,students seldom used relevant pre-reading strategies in their daily reading,especially pre-reading strategies such as active understanding of background knowledge and the structure,genre of the article.According to the above problems,some feasible suggestions were put forward for teachers to better design scientific and effective pre-reading activities and further promote the improvement of reading teaching quality.For example,teachers should attach more importance to the use of formal-schema-based pre-reading activities in teaching;teachers are supposed to train students to use pre-reading strategies and help them develop good reading habits before reading.