Schema Theory And Its Applications And Limitations In Teaching Of Reading

With the development of the theories of second language acquisition and the "information explosion" nowadays, reading is becoming more and more important for the students, especially for the English majors. It is now considered as the most important of the five basic skills. Thus the teaching syllabus puts the training of the students' higher reading ability to the first place. Naturally, how to improve students' English reading ability becomes the focus of English teachers in China. Currently, one of the prevailing perspectives toward the analysis of reading process is the schema theory. This paper aims to acquaint more English reading teachers with schema theory and the classroom application and then investigate the limitations of schema theory in EFL reading.Schema is usually explained as the general knowledge structure in readers' mind. Schema theory proposes that readers possess different conceptual frameworks which they bring to the reading of a text and which they use to make sense of what they read. In other words, schema theory is an explanation of how readers use prior knowledge to comprehend and learn from reading materials. The theory claims that the nature of reading comprehension is counted as an active process. In this process, the reader starts from the visual stimuli in the text through activation of prior schemata in his mind and obtains a proper interpretation of the text, which is consistent with the intended intention of the author and has an impact on the reader. Efficient comprehension requires the ability to relate the textual material to the...