Schema Theory Applied To Teaching English Newspaper Reading To EFL Students

For the purpose of improving English reading level, many teachers and students apply Schema Theory to direct their reading activities. By reviewing the typical models of reading, this paper gives a brief introduction to Schema Theory from the aspects of the four types of schemata, their respective functions, and the applications of Schema Theory. As a popular kind of teaching in English reading, teaching newspaper reading is the focus of the paper, which explores the scientific theory of helping improve students'newspaper reading ability.By analyzing the format and distinctive features of English newspapers, and through s series of recent teaching activities using newspapers, the author finds out that the major approach to teaching newspaper reading is to help students build and activate relative schemata.To investigate the possibility of the integration of Schema Theory and teaching English newspaper reading, the author made a survey on the internet to explore the major reasons which lead to the reading difficulty of the EFL students. The results of the survey question have shown that the main difficulties for EFL students in reading English newspapers lie in lack of relative schemata. The shortage of linguistic schema is common among the freshmen, but with the enlargement of the students'vocabulary and improvement of their reading ability, higher grade students'difficulty with the content schema related to the background knowledge becomes more obvious.Hence, on the basis of the survey, the author puts forward some practical advice on applying Schema Theory to the strengthening of linguistic schema, organizational schema and strategy schema, and content schema to teaching English newspaper reading .