The Influence Of Schema On English Learners' Comprehension And Its Enlightenment For The Teaching Of Reading

In foreign language teaching and learning, reading is a very important factor, for it is the important approach for students to acquire foreign language knowledge and skills. For many students of English, reading is by far the most important of the four skills in the foreign language (Carrel 1989). Effective reading is also the focus in college English teaching. In the 1970s, Rumelhart put forward the notion of interactive approaches in the process of reading, which holds much promise for our understanding of the complex nature of reading, especially as it occurs in a foreign language teaching situation. It is generally accepted that the reading process not only involves polishing language and concepts, but it also involves making use of the original background knowledge. If the reader has much background knowledge, it can make up for the shortage of the reading ability in the processing of the reading material. During the reading process, the 'schema' is the basis for cognition, for all the information processing originates from it. My paper sets forth a hypothesis based on the schema theory, and discusses the directory role played by the phenomenonof schema on the teaching of English reading.The application of the schema theory on English reading will help the students build up a good reading sense. Any text, as the only medium between the writer and reader, does not carry meaning. Only when the reader makes a linkage between his background knowledge and the language information of the text can this communicative function be carried out. So, the result of the interaction between the background knowledge and the language information constitutes the comprehension; the more consistent the relationship between them, the higher rate of the comprehension. This thesis consists of six parts:Part I illustrates the concept of schema in the reading process, which serves as the theoretical foundation for the argumentation of the whole paper. The gist of schema and schema theory, reading and reading process will be quoted and analyzed in this part. And the significance of the schema theory is also put forward.Part II deals with three models for the reading process. These are the bottom-up processing, the top-down processing and the interactive processing. The first two models are effective in theirown field respectively; whereas the last model is more comprehensive. We can say that it has synthesized the strong points of the two former ones.Part HI presents three types of schemata in reading, that is, the linguistic schema, the content schema and the textual schemata. All these three will play a part in the reading comprehension. But as to which one is more significant, we need to analyze them in specific situations.Part IV is concerned with the role of schema on the English reading. Since schema is the pre-existing knowledge or background knowledge in people's mind, the act of activating background knowledge is essential, so that the content schema can be established. Meaning predicting can also assist the reading process. The Extraction of the main idea and the analysis of the textual structure can't be neglected, during which period the reader can make judgment, deduction and choice.Part V mentions the purpose of this research study, the subjects to be involved, measurement for study, and analyses of the result.Part VI points out some implications of this study for the teaching of English reading, as well as some limitations of the study.