Effectiveness Of The Schema-theory-based Strategies For Teaching English Reading In Senior High Schools

Reading acts as a major way of learning English.Within the domain of FLT,the capacity of reading comprehension has gained its indispensable status.However,presently,to a large extent,one of the major problems in reading is that reading is merely regarded as a simple process of decoding linguistic symbols,which convey meanings from its writer to its reader in a one-way direction.Consequently,readers are totally playing a passive role and currently teaching English reading in senior high schools always fails to achieve the desired effect.Fortunately,with the rising status of cognitive science,psychology and psycholinguistics are growing fields of study,the importance of which to a theory of language teaching in hardly in question today.So people started to take up a view of subjectivism when it comes to English reading.From the perspective of psycholinguistics,Reading is regarded as an open system,which is closely connected to both one’s encyclopedic knowledge and personal experiences.All the information stored in our mind are classified into different groups and correspondingly stored in different nodes,which are commonly known “schema”.Schema theory has been widely applied to researches on reading comprehension since the late 1970 s.However,the research in this area is more focused on theoretical exploration,In the context of the widespread use of General Senior High School Curriculum Standards(2017edition)to guide high school English teaching,there are relatively few empirical studies on the use of schema theory for high school English reading.In view of this,this study tries to come up with schema-theory-based strategies for teaching English reading in senior high schools and use it as a variable to investigate the effects of schema-theory-based strategies for teaching English reading on students’ English reading levels and on their reading interests,attitudes,confidence and reading strategies in senior high schools,thus verifying the effectiveness and learning promotion function of schema-theory-based strategies for teaching English reading.This study adopted a “pre-test and post-test” experimental design,supplemented by questionnaires and in-depth interviews.An interview was conducted after the experiment in the experimental class and two questionnaires before and after the experiment were also carried out.The scores of the reading sections of the pre-test and post-test in the experimental and the control classes and the results of the two questionnaires in the experimental class were analyzed using the data analysis software SPSS22.0.By using the schema-theory-based strategies for teaching English reading in the experimental class and the traditional strategies for teaching English reading in the control class,this study is intended to find out: 1)Can the schema-theory-based strategies for teaching English reading improve students’ English reading levels? 2)Can the schema-theory-based strategies for teaching English reading improve students’ attitudes,interests,and confidence in English reading and their reading strategies?The results showed that after 16 weeks of intervention,1)the reading comprehension scores of students in the experimental class improved significantly,indicating that the schema-theory-based strategies for teaching English reading in senior high schools can improve students’ contextual interpretation,promote students’ expectation-driven understanding and facilitate their inference generation,which can be helpful in heightening students’ reading levels;2)the experimental class students’ reading interest,confidence,attitude and reading strategies were improved,which may be due to the fact that teaching English reading under the guidance of schema-theory-based strategies needs to be student-oriented,giving full play to students’ main role,and the effective realization of teachers’ guidance on students’ reading strategies.The results of the interview conducted in the experimental class after the experiment were consistent with the above results.This study mainly testifies the effectiveness of schema-theory-based strategies for English reading in senior high schools.At the theoretical level,it further bridges the schema theory and general senior high school curriculum standards;at the pragmatic level,it provides a new perspective for high school English reading teaching by proposing a series of schema-theory-based strategies for English reading teaching in senior high schools.