Study Of Application Of Schema Theory To The Teaching Of English Reading In Higher Vocational Colleges

At present, among the teaching of English Reading in Higher Vocational Colleges there are many problems:the big gap between students’English level and their learning abilities; teachers’preference to traditional teaching mode; the passiveness of students, who are supposed to be the subject of class activities; ignorance of teaching activities outside the classroom, etc. The surveys made by scholars (Pan 2009, Liu 2010, Liu 2011) indicate that there are various problems among teachers, students and teaching material in the teaching of English reading in High Vocational Colleges.According to schema theory, reading comprehension is the interaction between readers’background knowledge and language materials. Schema theory emphasizes that it is the readers’flexibility and validity of linguistic schema, content schema and formal schema that determine their reading abilities. Domestic related researches done by predecessors began in the 1980s. Many scholars have actively studied the application of schema theory to foreign language teaching. Generally researches can be divided into the following aspects:relations between schema theory and listening teaching, oral English teaching, reading teaching, vocabulary teaching, translation teaching, writing teaching, discourse comprehension and teaching, cross culture communication. There are certain studies with vocational students as the object of research, but students’English reading levels still need to be improved in order to meet the needs of the social enterprises. Accordingly, researches on the teaching of English reading in Higher Vocational Colleges, while truly with students-centered, are in an urgent need to be strengthened. Under the guidance of schema theory, the thesis first does a questionnaire about High Vocational students’expectation to the teaching of English reading; then based on the results of students’expectation, empirical teaching with the application of schema theory within one semester will be given; pre-test and post-test will be held before empirical teaching and after it. The problems this study tries to solve are as follows:(1) To the teaching of English reading what expectation do students in higher vocational colleges have? (2) Based on students’expectation, can the teaching of English reading with the application of schema theory improve students’reading ability? Results of the study are:(1) The questionnaire shows that vocational students expect teaching activities will be given during the pre-reading period, the while-reading period and the post-reading period in a balanced way. While referring to the expectation of teaching activities of the three kinds of schemata, linguistic schema is the highest, that of content schema and formal schema are also high. (2) It is positive that the applications of schema theory in the teaching processes can improve students’reading comprehension ability. The author gives some suggestion regarding to the research results.