The Guidance Of Schema Theory In The EFL Reading Instruction In Chinese Provincial Secondary Vocational Art Schools

In reading comprehension, the role of background knowledge has been formalized as schema theory. According to schema theory, the meaning of a text exists more in the reader's mind than in the text. A schema-theoretical view of reading holds that reading is an interactive process between the reader's background knowledge and the text. Schema theory influences reading comprehension through content schema and formal schema: more familiarity with the content leads to better comprehension, and more awareness of the structure of a text arrives at more complete comprehension and easier recalling. Schema functions in reading in four main aspects: providing framework for comprehension, facilitating to encode incoming information, making inferences possible and consolidating memory. Thus, a good reader is skillful in activating various schemas to understand a text.From schema theory some important principles of reading instruction can be drawn as follows: (1) Follow student-centered principle, activate and build up students' backgrounds. (2) Integrate content learning and cognitive development with language learning. (3)Use authentic reading materials.(4) Improve students' reading skills and vocabulary building. (5) Encourage students to read more and widely.In the art school where the author works, however, for lack of knowledge about reading, quite a few teachers overemphasized the role of language factor in reading comprehension, totally neglecting the role of the students' backgrounds. As a result, students could not achieve good comprehension of the text they were learning. Even worse, some of them felt frustrated and became depressed, for they made little progress in their reading. In order to solve this problem, the author analyzed the deficiencies of the teachers' instruction, proposed that an attempt should be made to use schema theory as a guidance in reading instruction.In order to test whether schema theory has a positive effect on the art school students' reading, the author, together with another teacher, carried out a three-month experiment in two classes of music major students. One class (the control class) continued to use the original reading teaching method, while the other class (the experimental class) received schema-oriented method. The result proved that schema theory is applicable to art students. It helps them develop an active and positive attitude to reading and in the long run, will improve their reading ability.