Application Of The Schema Theory In Senior Middle School English Reading Teaching

Reading is an essential skill for senior high school students learning English as second/foreign language (ESL/EFL). With strengthened English reading skills, students can make greater progress and obtain noticeable improvement in all academic areas. So all teachers in high schools are concerned about how to improve students’reading competence. And the new version of the Middle English Curriculum Standard for senior school students on reading also stresses the importance of improving students’ English reading ability.This research from the perspective of schema theory analyzes the present situation of English reading and obstacles in the traditional teaching. So author elaborated the necessity of the schema theory in English reading teaching. Changing teaching ideas, optimizing the teaching model and taking reasonable and effective teaching methods are necessary. This thesis aims at the exploration of the effectiveness of using schema and background knowledge in English reading and their function of improving reading abilities. The research consists of five chapters:Chapter one is the introduction, which contains the background, problems and significance of choosing the topic. Chapter two is the literature review. This part introduces three models of reading, the development of history about the schema theory and the relationship between schema and reading teaching. Chapter three and four describe the application of the schema theory to English reading teaching and the methodology, including three models of reading to activate schema, reading strategies, procedures of reading teaching, experiments’ data collection and research results. The last chapter is the conclusion, which involves the significance and limitation of applying schema theory to reading.The author uses one class to do the comparative experiment in a year. Last semester, the author uses the traditional teaching method and next semester adopts the teaching of scheme theory. From the experiment, we have obtained the following results:1) Schema theory improves students’interest in English reading and helps them grasp some strategies. It influences the effect of reading comprehension in English background knowledge. The more background knowledge students had, the better they could comprehend.2) In the test of reading part, under the guidance of schema theory, students improve their abilities to grasp main ideas.In the stage of high school, the author suggests that teachers can pay attention to strengthening the background knowledge in the classroom teaching. Let students preliminarily contact and understand a variety of background information, which will help students to improve their English reading speed. Teachers can help students understand the reading text with schema theory. This paper argues that schema theory as the basis, in the daily teaching, can effectively improve the students’reading ability.