An Experimental Study On The Application Of Schema Theory To The Teaching Of College English Reading

English reading is drawing more and more people's attention as a means of obtaining various kinds of information and one of the important teaching activities in College English Teaching.Therefore,it has become a research question worthy of efforts to improve our teaching method and enhance learners' reading comprehension.According to traditional linguistics,reading comprehension is a bottom-up decoding process. Under this view,the teaching method is centered only on instruction of vocabulary and grammatical rules.Since the 1950s,linguists both at home and abroad have put forward schema theory.This theory holds that integrating reader's background knowledge and prior experience into the text being read may improve his reading comprehension.Guided by this schema theory,the present research adopted two quantitative research methods:an experiment and questionnaire to investigate the effect of using schema theory in teaching reading.The subjects of the study were two classes of Grade 2008,majoring in Forestry Economics and Automation of Beijing Forestry University with the former as the Experimental Class(EC) and the latter as the Control Class(CC).The experiment lasted for 4 months,during which the Experimental Class received schema-theory-guided teaching,while the Control Class just had a normal teaching.Then the data were collected and analyzed using t-test,which showed a significant difference at the 5%level.The results obtained from the questionnaire were consistent with the results from the experiment.Both the experiment and the questionnaire show that the schema-theory-guided teaching had a positive effect on college English teaching and students' improvement of reading comprehension. Therefore,it is concluded that this research has,to some extent,some implications in terms of generalizability.