A Study Of Classroom Activities In English Reading Class Based On Schema Theory In Senior School

With the development of society,English becomes more and more important.This phenomenon directly determines the importance and necessity of the English course in senior school education.Reading comprehension is an important question type in English examination,which affects students’ English performance to a great extent.Therefore,cultivating students’ English reading ability is the key point in English reading teaching in senior school.The activity approach is a kind of teaching form which advocates to actively guide students to participate in various activities,gives full play to students’ initiative and creativity,and promotes students’ harmonious development by activities.The implementation of the new curriculum standards have changed the English reading class.In English reading class,by setting up a variety of classroom activities,English teachers arouse students’ interest in learning,cultivate students’ reading ability and improve their language ability.Schema theory is one of the important theories of modern reading theory.And under the guidance of schema theory,a variety of classroom activities are carried out in the English reading class of senior school.The implementation effect of these activities in senior school English reading class needs to be concerned.Based on schema theory and combined with the research results at home and abroad,this study uses questionnaire survey as the main research tool,supplemented by classroom observation,to make an investigation of 4 English teachers and their students from the first grade of a senior school.Research questions:(1)How are classroom activities distributed in English reading class?(2)In what way do classroom activities help improve students’ reading comprehension?(3)What are the problems and solutions of classroom activity design in English reading class?The research results show that:(1)The types of activity in pre-reading,while-reading and post-reading are relatively diverse.The main pre-reading activities are: picture presentation,topic discussion and title prediction;The main while-reading activities are the activity of completing the mind map,the activity of reading and answering questions,the activity of learning vocabulary and the activity of gap filling;The main post-reading activities are the activity of retelling the article,the activity of imitating writing,the activity of group discussions,the activity of summing up vocabularies,phrases and the activity of analyzing the long difficult sentences.(2)Pre-reading activities can help students activate content schemata.For example: pre-reading activities can help students understand the meaning of titles,subheadings,and illustrations in written language;pre-reading activities can help students predict the subject and content of the text based on the title.While-reading activities can helpstudents establish content schemata,linguistic schemata.For example: while-reading activities can help students extract the main information and opinions from the text,and understand the meaning of the text;while-reading activities can help students identify key words and concepts so as to find the target information.Post-reading activities can help students consolidate content schemata and linguistic schemata.For example: post-reading activities can help students extract the main information and opinions from the text,and understand the meaning of the text;post-reading activities can help students understand the author’s intentions;and post-reading activities can help students use relevant vocabularies and sentences.(3)When teachers design classroom activities based on schema theory,the pre-reading activities ignore the activation of linguistic schema and formal schema;most of the pictures selected by the picture presentation activity are text illustrations,which is of little significance;and students prefer the activity of video presentation,but the usage rate of this activity is low.The while-reading activities ignore the establishment of formal schema;teachers’ activity instruction is not clear enough;teachers can not help students guess the word meaning effectively;and in the process of reading,teachers don’t teach the reading methods.After reading,there are few activities related to formal schema,and the consolidation of the formal schema is neglected;design of the activity time is not sufficient;the activities are not diverse and interesting;the participation of students is not very high;the debate competition activity and group discussion activity need to be perfected.According to the problems,this study also puts forward the corresponding solutions,and advocates the full application of three kinds of schemata to the pre-reading,while-reading and post-reading activities.The research emphasizes activating schema in pre-reading,establishing schemata in while reading and consolidating schemata in post-reading.