Improve Students' Reading Ability With The Aid Of Schemata

Reading ability is essential for students to grasp a foreign language. As far as English teaching is concerned, it is significant to help students improve their reading ability in class. Nevertheless, though much of the efforts have been made in reading training, the expected objectives haven't been achieved in traditional teaching. It is often caused by the improper focus on language knowledge and decoding of words, which lead the students to ignore cultural backgrounds and rhetorical structures of the passages, eventually failing to gain better understanding. Currently, one of the prevailing perspectives toward the analysis of reading process is the schema theory. This paper aims to improve students' reading ability through classroom application of schema theory, helping students enrich schemata, activate schemata, use schemata as well as consolidating them to better comprehend passages.The paper is made up of five chapters. Chapter One is an overall introduction of the paper, that is, the significance of the research and basic structure of the article. Chapter Two is concerned with some relevant theories and researches in teaching reading. Chapter Three is application of schemas in class teaching, illustrating how to enrich, activate, use and consolidate schemas. Chapter Four is about an experiment and the analysis of data. The last chapter is the concluding section of the thesis, covering the main findings and presenting some unsolved problems.