The Influence Of Schemata On English Reading From The Perspective Of Background Knowledge And Vocabulary

In Chinese senior high schools, the English reading teaching can never be ignored and it waits for more improvement.For this reason, the author tries to make an experiment within the framework of the schema theory, aiming to find the cruxes of reading and the difference between the influence of background knowledge and vocabulary on reading, so that the paper can tell how the students and the teachers can overcome the obstacles of reading by establishing relative schemata and develop reading capacities and other qualities by taking the schema theory- based instruction approach.Data for the study came from the multiple comparisons within the experimental and the control groups. The experiment was 2×2 design with 2 variables, namely vocabulary and background knowledge. Two passages were used with four different treatments of the two variables. In the first treatment, before reading, the students were provided with the background knowledge related to the passages and a word list which hoped to help understanding the passages. In the second treatment, the students were provided with a word list attached to the passages before reading, but without any relative background knowledge. In the third treatment, the students were not given any word list attached to the passages, but they had learned some background knowledge before reading. In the fourth treatment, neither background knowledge nor word list was provided before reading. The subjects came from Class 1, Class 2, Class 3 and Class 5 in Senior 2 of Quanzhou Experimental High School. Based on the analysis of the results, the paper puts forward the conclusions that there is some significant difference in the influence of the background knowledge and vocabulary on the reading process when the reading material is expository while there is no obvious difference at the reading of practical writings, and that schemata can facilitate the students' reading comprehension, the building of rich schemata, including background knowledge and vocabulary, leads to effective reading. So the key of the English reading teaching in senior schools lies in the proper input of a broader vocabulary and richer background knowledge. Therefore, in the teaching of English reading in senior high schools, teachers are required to provide their students with rich background knowledge, help them establish relative schemata, enlarge their implicit knowledge and accelerate the automatization processes from explicit knowledge to implicit knowledge. The author also touches upon the limitations of the experiment and the suggestions about further study.