An Action Research On Word Attack Skill Training Between Knowing Words And Understanding Content

It is well established that text-appropriate schema and word attack skills are two of the fundamental aspects that affect reading comprehension. This paper, based on schema theory, mainly deals with what roles word attack strategy plays in foreign language reading and how it applies to Chinese senior middle school students, and gives suggestions on how to improve the teaching of English reading. The paper will follow up with a detailed report on the planning, actual teaching, and results obtained in a twelve-week period of research, which was carried out to teach to the third-year senior middle school students at Pinggu Middle School attached to Beijing Normal University. The research indicates learners will read better in the language if they know how to think about what they read, how to use prior information to top-down into the context. The researcher found that readers would get a highly revealing clues to understand the meaning of an unknown word if they have a clear picture of the relationships between the sentences in a paragraph and the word in structure. The researcher also found the more classroom activities, which engages the student in the construction of word meaning using context and prior knowledge, the more of the attainment of a full comprehension the students will get.