Study On Schema Theory And English Newspaper Reading And Learning

Reading is very important in the modern English learning. English newspaper, an important way of improving reading, possesses colorful content and various genres. But at present many readers haven't had good reading strategy and learning skills when reading newspaper, leading to low reading speed and inefficiency.As for these problems, this paper is on the standpoint of readers when reading, combining with the characteristics of English newspaper articles, and probe the schema-based reading strategy and learning skills, so as to improve the efficiency of reading newspaper articles and cultivate good reading habit. From the literature review we can see that the previous studies of this field mainly were on the point of teacher to probe the schema-based teaching of English newspaper reading. While this paper is on the standpoint of readers when reading and probe the strategy of how to apply schema theory and its three types into English newspaper reading and the learning skills. Most scholars have only paid attention to study news and ignored other genres. While this paper focuses on three main types of journalism---news, feature, and editorial. The differences of three genres in aspects of characteristics and writing purpose determine the differences of reading purpose and habits.This paper is based on the schema theory. Schema is gathering knowledge units, and cognitive building block, involving affairs and objects in all forms, which is the memory for human being of assembly and classification of all knowledge. Schema reading theory considers that schema is the foundation of cognition. Before people receive new information, there is already numerous knowledge stored in head, namely schema, including people's previous experience, facts or learned knowledge, etc, which are classified through processing and stored in head to provide readers as reference frame and help to comprehend the reading materials. When reading readers will invoke these schemata promptly, and then choose, predict, check, confirm or revise the information constantly in the material. There are three types of schema which determine readers'reading ability:content schema---the background knowledge of the content area of a text or the topic a text being talked about; formal schema---background knowledge about the formal, rhetorical, organizational structures of different kinds of texts; linguistic schema---prior linguistic knowledge, such as grammar, vocabulary, phrases, and sentences.This paper compares the similarities and differences among news, feature, and editorial in the aspects of discourse structure, lexicon, grammar, and sentence structure. And this paper also analyzes the application of three types of schema theory--- content schema, formal schema, and linguistic schema---nto news, feature, and editorial and their activation. As for newspaper articles, content schema refers to readers'background and cultural knowledge of the topic of the newspaper articles; formal schema refers to readers'knowledge about genres and structures of English newspaper articles; linguistic schema refers to readers'knowledge about lexical, grammar, and sentences of the articles in the three genres.The conclusion of this paper suggests that schema-based reading should be an active thinking process. "The top-down processing" and "the bottom-up processing" are used at the same time, and readers should activate schema according to the characteristics of newspaper articles. The first step is to activate stored content schema when read the title, predict the following context, and read with designed questions. The second step is to activate formal schema according to different genres so as to grasp the emphases of articles fast, skimming or ignoring the rest context as the readers'demand. Then every word and every sentence read in the body will form newly-created schema constantly. Readers should predict the rest parts according to old and newly-created schema, and further predict and design relevant question about the rest. In the reading process, with interactive reading mode, readers use linguistic schema while using content schema and formal schema. Thus, these three types, which are of the same importance, are utilized at the same time. But as for English newspaper reading, the influence of content schema is far more than that of formal schema and linguistic schema, and it is content schema that readers get after reading. Readers get content schema via linguistic schema and formal schema, so improving linguistic schema and formal schema helps to achieve more content schema, and more content schema can help to read more efficiently and get linguistic schema, thus, reading turns to the virtuous circle. This paper is based on the corpus of several newspaper articles, taking from The Washington post, The New York Times, China Daily, and so on, and set these examples as to analyze reading strategy combining with...