L2 Reading And Schema A Study On The Cultural Schema Of Chinese EFL Readers

The teaching of reading in the EFL/ESL classroom has always been a problem. Educators and researchers in this field have made great efforts with an attempt to explore the process and nature of reading in both L1 and L2. Among all these studies, schema theory provides an enlightenment which holds that the reader's background knowledge plays a significant role in reading. As far as foreign language reading is concerned, cultural schema or the background knowledge of culture claims a significant part in the framework of schema, which is subcategorized into linguistic schema, content schema and formal schema. Anderson (1977:369) concluded"Every stage of comprehension involves the reader's background knowledge of culture."As a matter of fact, the teachers of English find that in the process of reading many Chinese students already possess the demanded linguistic knowledge and the basic cognitive skills, and they are also well prepared for non-intelligent elements such as motivation, purpose, emotion and automatic-control ability, etc; however, they still cannot comprehend the texts quite well or achieve so-called'reading between the lines'effect for the lack of cultural background knowledge of the target language.This paper made a study on the cultural schemata in EFL reading from the perspective of schema theory. An experiment on Chinese college students was carried out to test the effect of cultural schemata on EFL reading comprehension. And ten native speakers of English were also involved in the experiment for the purpose of comparison and a rather objective analysis. The experiment conducted in this paper indicates that without an appropriate cultural schema and sufficient background knowledge of culture, the readers will have difficulties in comprehension in EFL reading. It was also found that for readers of intermediate and advanced language proficiency cultural schema is more important than the level of language proficiency and the factor whether the text being read is reader-friendly enough to activate their schema.Then on the basis of the experiment and taking English and Chinese language as the examples, the paper illustrates in detail, from the perspective of the relationship between language and culture, the influence of target language culture on EFL reading comprehension at the level of words, discourses, and meanwhile discusses the implicit and explicit feature of cultural schemata so as to point out the crucial importance, necessity and difficulty of the construction of cultural schemata for readers in foreign language reading classroom. This study coincides with the idea of cross-cultural foreign language teaching on the basis of cross-cultural communication study.Finally we hold that in China EFL teachers have realized the importance of culture more than before; however, few of them have put it into practice in teaching reading. For the purpose of integrating culture with reading in practical teaching, this thesis attempts to discuss and suggest some feasible methods and approaches through which cultural schema of the target language will be constructed gradually in readers'minds in the L2 classroom.