A Study Of Concept-Map-Based Interactive Teaching Model For English Reading

Schema theory points out that people's understanding of new facts, to some extent, is based on their existing schemata. From the middle 1980s, many researchers have tried to apply schema theory to the study of foreign language reading, aiming at explaining the interrelationship between background knowledge and language difficulty, and thus improving the effect of foreign language teaching. However, there's lack of effective interaction method and guidance principle to support the application of schema theory in the area of interactive foreign language teaching. Following the objectives of public English teaching reform that were advocated by the Ministry of Education of China in 2004, this thesis explores the interactive teaching model for English reading based on concept map from the following four aspects:Firstly, this thesis proposes some distinct and explicit interactive strategies for teachers to use the concept map to organize the interaction between students and teachers, between students themselves, between internal cognition and external text, as well as between linguistic and non-linguistic factors.Secondly, this thesis develops the course design principle with the aim of improving the students' reading skills. The design principle is based on topic materials and with the support of the Internet.Thirdly, this thesis proposes a three-level interaction procedure for English reading to stimulate the interaction from surface to deep level of cognition. Students are required to draft surface-level concept maps before they read, the deep-level concept maps after they read and the evaluation concept maps after they discuss their concept map. They participate in the continuous, accumulative, informational, and retrospective interaction through the three-level reading session. During the interaction, teachersthrough the three-level reading session. During the interaction, teachers diagnose the concept maps through class discussion joined in by the students and identify the weakest schema for each student. Then the teachers designate studying strategies and plans for each student according to the cognition results to improve the students' reading ability.Fourthly, this thesis redefines student's and teacher's role in the teaching process. The interactive teaching model we have proposed emphasizes the diversity of cognition, in particular, and the creative interpretation of students. Accordingly, students should be the principal part of teaching process of English reading and should be given the priority of autonomous action. The formation of reading habit depends on students' subjective wills. The roles of teacher in the process of teaching English reading at different points should be a guide, an inspirator, a consultant and a pursuer.Through the analysis of an experimental case, we prove that the concept-map-based interactive teaching model for English reading can function as the evaluation, guidance and interaction methods. At the same time, the abstract formal schema and content schema can be quantified by using the concept map as evaluation tool, which provides the reference value both for the application research and academic research of schema theory. Moreover, the concept-map-based interactive teaching model demonstrates the differences between individual cognition, which indicates a new direction for the personalized interactive teaching of English reading.