Effect Of Schemata-Based Interactive Model On The Teaching Of Reading For Non-English Majors

For many students, reading is by far the most important of the four skills in a second language. Reading was confirmed as a psycholinguistic process that involves the reader's active participation. It is a dynamic activity, a process of translating printed letters into meanings and incorporating the new meanings into existing cognitive systems. In other words, it operates only through the interaction between textual features and expectations generated by prior knowledge in the reader's mind. In a word, reading involves the reader's active manipulation of his schemata (the plural form of schema).Schema theory is an integration of the bottom-up and the top-down model. It has been used to explain how the reader interacts with the text to arrive at comprehension. A schema is a general knowledge structure made up of slots. It includes information about what can or must fill in each slot and the relationships among the slots. Carrel distinguishes two forms of schemata: formal and content, and this thesis emphasizes particular on content schema which refers to the background knowledge about the content area of a text. The reader's reading ability is largely based on the number, the scope and the depth of his schemata, and as the reader reads the text, he activates, evaluates, refines or discards his schemata. So we can see that a schema is first activated by some linguistic items in the text. Then an activated schema will facilitate comprehension in two ways. One way is to help the reader to construct and test predictions on how the text will develop on a higher or on a lower level, reducing his uncertainty until comprehension is arrived at. The other way is to help the reader to infer what is implicitly expressed in the text, thus enabling him to understand far beyond the mere text information. In order to integrate theory with practice, subsequently, the author employs the methods of questionnaire and case study to investigate the real situation of non-English majors in reading. On the basis of the above analyses, the author discovers some peculiar phenomena and reveals their reasons. Eventually, the author elaborates some practical methods to solve the problems for the purpose to improve the reading abilities of non-English majors.From the view of schema theory, the only means to improve their reading abilities is to enlarge their background knowledge, that is to say, to activate their relevant schemata. Therefore, students and teachers should cooperate. Firstly, ESL teacher must provide the students with appropriate schemata he is lacking, and must also teach the students how to build bridges between existing knowledge and new knowledge by employing diagram, multimedia, discussion, etc. Moreover, teachers should select or develop appropriate materials for students to read in order to help them minimize cultural misunderstanding and interference and to maximize comprehension of reading materials. For instance, to introduce some common sense about western customs, habits, educational systems and so on. Secondly, students can learn to do this themselves by seeking out materials on a similar subject in order to build background knowledge. Furthermore, they should try their best to make connections which do not exist in the text, but which are provided by his schematic knowledge activated by linguistic cues. In conclusion, this thesis, which investigates the reading actuality from the viewpoint of schema theory, aims at finding out the reading problems of non-English majors as well as solving them by activating the relevant schemata already stored in students' mind. To a certain extent, the research possesses some academic and practical value.