The Application Of Schema Instantiation To The Teaching Of EFL Reading

In foreign language teaching and learning, reading is a very important aspect, for it is an important approach for students to acquire foreign language knowledge and skills. For many students of English, reading is by far the most important of the four skills in the foreign language (Carrell, 1989). Effective reading is also the focus in English teaching. In the teaching of English reading, however, there exist some problems, which result in failing to cultivate students' reading ability. To solve these problems, this paper focuses on the guidance of schema instantiation to the teaching of reading.It is generally accepted that the reading process not only involves polishing language and concepts, but also involves making use of the original background knowledge. The role of background knowledge in language comprehension has been formalized as schema theory (Carrell and Eisterhold, 1987: 220). According to schema theory, comprehending a text is an interactive process between the reader's background knowledge and the text. When a reader applies his background knowledge to guide him through reading, he in effect adopts the top-down process to make prediction and assumptions about the incoming text. Simultaneously, he uses the bottom-up process to acquire information from decoding words, phrases and sentences in the text. This process...