| The teaching of reading in the EFL class in China is supposed to be the most important course for English learners in colleges and universities. The importance of reading in EFL teaching and learning has been acknowledged. It is well known that English is learned primarily as a means of gaining information through the written language. And reading provides the most efficient and hence the most important channel of linguistic input through which students improve their linguistic competence. As language is a tool of communication, the tool must be used in communication for successful language learning. Therefore, the teaching of reading is not only to develop linguistic competence, but also to cultivate students' communicative competence.However, the traditional teaching of reading based on grammar-translation has been prevailing. This teaching model possesses some demerits that inhibit the development of the students' reading proficiency and reading skills rather than promote them. It views the EFL reading as a passive decoding process, in which new words, phrases and even sentence patterns are taken as discrete language points and elaborated upon by the teacher but the gist of the text is usually overlooked. From this bottom-up, passive fashion of reading arises the complaint that students "can not see the wood for the trees". As a result, students are linguistically competent in part, but can not communicate effectively andappropriately. Their communicative ability can not be developed. This way of teaching severely frustrates students' initiative and restrains the development of students' potential and creativity.As scheme theory and discourse analysis are introduced, the TEFL reading is revolutionized to much extent. In the schema-theoretical view reading is an interaction process, which includes interaction between bottom-up and top-down processing, that between lower-level and high-level skills, and that between reader's background knowledge and the background knowledge presupposed in the text. Schema theory emphasizes the importance of prior knowledge (i.e. background knowledge), which is essential to activate the relevant schemata in reading instruction. Discourse analysis concern itself with describing the higher level organization and structure of written or spoken texts. It aims to study communicative purpose and strategies in using the language. In the teaching of reading discourse analysis help students understand texts not only as linguistic but also as social, meaningful constructs. This dissertation tries to elaborate on the integration of schema theory and discourse analysis in the teaching of reading, providing a practical application in teaching reading, which is promising for teachers to facilitate the teaching of EFL reading.This dissertation consists of six parts:Part One gives a brief introduction to the status quo of the teaching of reading in colleges, and reviews the studies in EFL reading.Part Two elaborates the nature of reading, which includes a cognitive process, a constructive process, an interactive process and a strategic process. This part also deals with the levels of comprehension. Thus they contribute to the teaching of reading.Part Three investigates schema theory and discourse analysis, and also three models of reading, bottom-up, top-down and interactive model. In this part several distinct patterns of discourse and strategies of discourse coherence are discussed, which lay a theoretic basis for the study in this dissertation.Part Four illustrates the implications for teaching reading and proposes the integration of schema theory and discourse analysis in college English teaching. In the teaching of reading the teacher should attach great importance to developing students' reading strategies and improving their intercultural awareness.Part Five is a practical application in the teaching of reading. Through pre-reading,while-reading, and post-reading activities, the interests of students are aroused. They actively make use of reading strat...
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