Effects Of Cultural Schema On College English Reading-from The Perspective Of Schema Theory

Reading is one of the most direct and effective methods to accumulate knowledge in English learning and reading are the necessary skill for English as Foreign Language (EFL) students to master. Major theories on reading comprehension are developing from behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism. Kant, the man who firstly used term "schema" in literature, developed schema theory to explain background knowledge for reading comprehension. The reason that schema theory is widely accepted as a key role in reading comprehension is based on the assumption that the readers' prior knowledge directly impacts the new learning. Researchers abroad show that schema theory has an important effect on English reading. Scholars at home have also made some studies on the relationship between schema theory and English reading teaching, which mainly focuses on the theories or introducing their own experience without authentic evidence.The author investigated 63 college students' reading habits and reading difficulties with the use of questionnaire. It was found that most of students didn't have good reading habits and had some reading difficulties in their reading. Through the investigation, extensive reading class and their pre-reading activities, the author found that College English teachers had not paid much attention to pre-reading activities and made full use of pre-reading activities to help college students comprehend the passage: meanwhile college students knew that background knowledge was very important for their reading, but they did not know how to get background knowledge and they had weak awareness to use pre-reading activities.The present study aims to investigate the effects of cultural knowledge on the reading comprehension of non-English major college students with the use of the cognitive linguistic theory—schema theory.The two purposes were stated in the study. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the influence that cultural schema has on the reading comprehension of readers of English as a second language. A secondary purpose was to examine the relationships between cultural-schema-based pre-reading activities and reading proficiency.The study involved 63 freshmen in two groups and an analysis of the data collected from the two research methods: (1) Experiment, four passages were pre-tested and four passages were post-tested for the participants to examine the improvement of their reading comprehension; (2) Questionnaire, twenty-five questions were used to identify the reading habits the participants often applied in their reading.To test the effect of content schema on reading, two passages were designed in which one was biography, the other was narrative of a place or something foreign. It has proved that with the aid of content schema, students have overcome the difficulties caused by lacking background knowledge and have a better understanding of the content.To test the effect of formal schema on reading, other two passages were involved: one was an exposition, the other was an argumentation. Before the test, the students knew little about formal schema and had no idea about the structure. While after the experiment, students first judged the style of the passage and then analyzed it according to the characteristics of different styles.The findings indicate that cultural familiarity of the participants really plays good effect on EFL reading comprehension, prior knowledge is significantly effective for readers with lower reading proficiency. Cultural-schema-based pre-reading activities also have good effect on EFL reading comprehension, and could make up for the lack of cultural schema of the Chinese college students. And cultural-schema-based pre-reading activities also have different effect on readers with different reading proficiency.Based on the results of the study, teachers of ESL reading need to facilitate reading by providing specific background experience; make students aware of the rhetorical organization of texts to contribute to reading fluency and efficiency; apply different ways of teaching and different cultural-schema-based pre-reading activities aiming at students of different levels.