An Empirical Study On Schema Theory Based Pre-reading Application At Vocational Colleges

As an important source of information,reading plays a dominant role among four skills in foreign language acquisition for English learners.The teaching of reading has always been given great prominence in language teaching.The development of schema theory provides significant contributions to the teaching of reading.It holds that reading is an interactive progress between readers’ previous knowledge about a given topic and the text the reader is reading.The schema theory provides theoretical basis for the prereading activities in teaching reading.Pre-reading activities can help readers to activate their background knowledge and better understand the writers’ viewpoints and purposes.Therefore,pre-reading activities can not only improve students’ reading ability but also construct new schema.However,most current research on pre-reading activities in China are mostly centered on the theory and teaching methods instead of on the practice which can provide a set of feasible methods capable of guiding pre-reading activities.Besides,the subjects of most empirical researches are the students of college or university,junior middle school and senior high school.Researches on students of vocational colleges are relatively insufficient.Based on the schema theory,the author conducted a three-month experiment.80 students majoring in preschool education from a Teachers’ College were chosen as the subjects.Questionnaires,interview,and tests are applied in the experiment.The research attempts to provide reliable data for the application of schema-theory-basedpre-reading activities and provide efficient pre-reading activities for vocational college students in reading passages with different genres.The author analyzed the statistics from the research and obtained three main findings.Firstly,the present application of pre-reading activities at vocational colleges is not optimistic.Most students are unaware of the importance of background knowledge and haven’t formed the habit pre-reading.Secondly,during the experiment the author applied six pre-reading activities including anticipating guide,K-W-L,communicative pre-reading activities,skeleton prediction,three-step instructional procedure and semantic mapping.These activities proved to be feasible to facilitate students to comprehend passages with different genres.Thirdly,by making a comparative analysis of the two questionnaires and interviews,the author found that the overall average score of post-questionnaire is 0.83 higher than that of pre-questionnaire,which means the frequency of students’ application of pre-reading activity is higher and students have cultivated a good habit of making good use of all kinds of visual clues to predict the content of the reading passages.Meanwhile,by analyzing the data collected from the pre-test and post-test,it can be found that the mean score of the post-test in EC is 3.84 points higher than that of the pre-test,demonstrating that there is a significant improvement in students’ reading competence by applying pre-reading activities.The significance of this research is that the experiment on schema theory-based pre-reading activities provides some pedagogical implications for vocational colleges to implement pre-reading activities.Most important of all,the research cultivates students’ good reading habit and improves their reading competence by applying proper prereading activities.