A Study Of The Effectivity Of The Schema Theory In The Improvement Of Students' English Reading Comprehension Ability

Reading, as one of the four basic skills of language learning, is important in EFL/ESL learning and teaching. Efficient reading is extraordinarily beneficial for the improvement of readers'English competence, especially their English reading abilities. Many experts abroad and domestic have paid much attention on the importance of efficient reading to foreign language and second language learning and teaching. Accordingly, many researches are carried out in the point of improving readers'English reading abilities.As one of the most popular perspectives towards reading research, schema theory provides an account to the knowledge structure and emphasizes the fact that what we comprehend is influenced by what we already know. Schemata represent an active process and can change over time as a result of new experiences. It is a more scientific reading model than traditional ones.In China, previous researches on the applications of schema theory in English reading mainly focus on the field of college or high school English education, and rarely probe into the specific situation of English majors'English reading learning and teaching. If any, they are qualitative studies lacking exact and valid statistic support. The study of the effectivity of the schema theory on the improvement of students', especially the English majors'English reading abilities, is still fresh in this filed. It will be a meaningful attempt for EFL teaching.This thesis mainly consists of five parts. The first chapter is a general introduction of the thesis. It contains the significance, objectives and framework of the present study. Chapter two is overviews the literature of the reading process, schema theory and the grammar-translation method. Chapter three introduces the participants, instruments and procedures of the schema theory guided teaching experiment. The data are carefully collected and analyzed. A statistical analysis of the collected data is presented in the fourth chapter, as well as a thorough discussion of the main findings. Chapter five draws a conclusion for the whole thesis. Objective limitations of the teaching experiment are pointed out directly, as well as some practical suggestions for the effective teaching of English reading.The study attempts to answer the following two questions:1. Will the application of schema theory to English reading teaching greatly improve English majors' reading comprehension abilities and facilitate their reading comprehension?2. Does the application of schema theory to English reading teaching for English majors results in the same improvement to students from all areas? If not, which group benefits more, students from cities or those from countryside?To find out the answers of the above two research questions, the author chooses two classes randomly from Xi'an Innovation College of Yan'an University to do the schema theory based English reading teaching experiment. Up to 82 freshmen of English majors are investigated from October 2009 to January 2010 (the first semester) in the experiment. Schema theory is applied in the teaching process of English reading in one class, while the students in the other class are taught by the traditional grammar-translation method. There are test papers selected from the "reading comprehension" section of TEM4 in 2008 and 2009 respectively to the experiment participants before and after the experiment, in order to find out whether the application of schema theory in English reading teaching can improve English majors'reading abilities and facilitate their reading comprehension or not. After careful analysis of the data collected from the pre-test and post-test, the results come out as follows:1. The application of schema theory to English reading teaching does greatly improve English majors'reading abilities and facilitate their reading comprehension.2. The effectivity of the application of schema theory to English reading teaching leads to significant differences between students from cities and those from countryside. The students from cities benefit more than those who come from countryside.