A Study Of The Effect Of Pre-Reading On Reading Comprehension In Light Of Schema Theory

Listening,speaking,reading and writing are four basic skills in any language study.Reading comprehension is one of the main purposes of ESL teaching/learning. Many students have difficulties in obtaining the global meanings of texts.This paper intends to propose some suggestions on how to help students reach a deeper understanding of texts in reading classroom within the framework of schema theory, especially pre-reading.It mainly discusses the important effect of prior knowledge,previewing,questioning,and semantic mapping on further understanding.By doing teaching experiment to put these approaches into actual use,the conclusion can be made that texts become easier to understand when the teacher enhances the students' prior knowledge and guide them to link their existing knowledge to the new text.Through using pre-reading,the students' reading comprehension is improved and the students feel confident when they are doing reading comprehension.