Efects Of Frame-based Teaching Method On Reading Comprehension

It is proved that reading is an interactive process between the readers' background knowledge and the printed words, which is an interactive psychological process between linguistic knowledge and background knowledge. According to the frame theory, the elements of a frame can activate the whole cognitive frame to promote text understanding. Readers' frames determine what they comprehend, how well they comprehend and whether they can make an adequate comprehension.The concept of frame was put forward by Minsky in the middle of 1970s, which was used in Artificial Intelligence (AI) originally. It was introduced into linguistics by Charles Fillmore and has become one of the popular research topics in the cognitive linguistics gradually. Researchers abroad show that frame theory has an effect on text understanding. Researchers at home also have proved the effect of frame theory on text understanding. But there is little research on the application of frame theory in reading comprehension, especially, in the teaching of College English Integrated Course. Based on the frame theory, this study uses a frame-based teaching method in teaching reading and tests its effectiveness with a contrastive analysis of the reading comprehension achievements between the experiment class and the control class.According to the different characteristics of each text, the writer uses linguistic, content and formal frames respectively to help the students activate, build and consolidate their cognitive frames to improve their reading comprehension. In order to test the effects of the teaching method, the writer administered a pretest and a posttest. The results of the two tests proved that reading teaching method based on the frame theory can improve the students'reading comprehension in the aspects of linguistics, content and formal respectively. Also, it is proved that the application of the frame-based teaching method can have a better effect on improving the students' reading comprehension than the traditional one.