The Application Of Schema Theory In College English Reading Teaching

Reading as one important literacy takes a significant part in learning foreign languages. Itis one primary channel through which the students obtain information, develop vocabularyand promote the ability in writing. High reading ability is badly needed in the modern society,which therefore calls for high quality of teaching reading in our country.Reading is a process involving the readers'interaction with the reading material or,accurately speaking, the writer. What the readers bring to this communication is their alreadyknowns about the world from their own experiences by listening, watching, feeling or justimagining. The more background knowledge the readers possess concerning the topic that thereading materials cover, the easier they can comprehend the materials as intended by theirwriters.The role of background knowledge, knowledge of a language and the world, in theprocess of comprehending is better studied by schema theory. According to this theory,background knowledge, referred to as schema, is always changing as one's direct or indirectexperience is on the increase. Schema facilitates the reading process like providingbackground knowledge, generating predictions and inference, which finally helps the readerto obtain the successful comprehension of the reading material. Such process necessitates theconstruction and the activation of schema.So under the guidance of schema theory, the teacher's task in the reading class revolvesaround the process of helping the students to construct and activate their relevant schema bymeans of various activities from the pre-reading stage, while-reading stage to post-readingstage. Student-centered classroom ought to be built in order to foster competent andindependent readers. Sufficient time should be left for the students to practice the readingstrategies and appreciate the reading process with their own active participation. Due to thefact that several hours reading in class every week is far from sufficient for students toimprove their reading ability, students need to be encouraged to do with more readings after class through books or the internet. Extension of reading greatly works for the construction ofschema, which arms the students for the reading task in the future.In this paper, based on bodies of works concerning reading and schema theory, teachingprinciples and activities are proposed for English reading class in Chapter Three. Anexperiment is conducted to check whether the schema-oriented method can expectedly yieldthe positive outcome in reading class. Schema-oriented teaching method is applied in oneclass (called as the Experimental Class), while the other class (called as the Control Class) istaught in the regular way. After one- semester-long experiment, students'scores of the twoclasses in three tests are analyzed by SPSS 16.0. As expected, the analysis of the data provesthat the schema-oriented method does better work in improving students'reading ability.All in all, it is the students themselves who are to deal with sorts of reading materialsbeyond classroom. The ultimate goal of in reading class is"to enable students to enjoy (or atleast feel comfortable with) reading in the foreign language, and to read without helpunfamiliar authentic texts, at appropriate speed, silently and with adequate understanding."...