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

In traditional sense, reading is viewed as a passive skill. Problems of second language reading were viewed as being essentially decoding problems. Later, scholars developed a psycholinguistic perspective of reading, focusing on its active, cognitive processes. During the 1980s, interactive models of reading were proposed, which argue that both bottom-up and top-down processes work together interactively as parts of the reading process. The schema theory model is a typical one. According to schema theory, comprehending a text is an interactive process between the reader's background knowledge and the text. In this view of second language reading, not only the reader, an active participant in the reading process, but also everything in the reader's prior knowledge are important.Schema was firstly brought forward by philosopher Kant in 1781, but it was finally theorized in the 1980's. Since then it has gradually become one of the most popular theories in the second language acquisition studies. Researchers abroad (Carrell, 1981, 1983; Anderson, 1979, Johnson, 1981) state that schema theory has an important effect on English reading. Since 1990s, scholars at home(Chen Siqing, 1992; Li Yuanfang 1993; Chen Xianchun 1998; Xu Yulong,1999; Wang Peng, 2002; Li Hong 2003 etc. ) have made some studies on the relationship between schema theory and English reading teaching. The author of the present paper was faced with the task of helping the students to enhance their reading ability and prepare for CET4 within one year, so the author made attempts by means of the schema theory to find an effective way to improve college English teaching of reading.To start with, the thesis mainly discusses schemata theory, which involves different definitions of schemata and the classification of schemata knowledge, later the author elaborates the theories on reading, from the definition of reading and reading comprehension to three different reading models, which show that the most efficient reading model is the interactive reading model, in which schemata knowledge is not only necessary but also important. In the following part, the thesis briefly states the function of schema in reading comprehension, from which the author gains inspiration and finds out the applications of the schema theory in English reading teaching of college students; and at the same time, the author offers a reading teaching model of a text, which shows how to use schemata theory in reading comprehension teaching; in the last part of the thesis, an experiment is done between two classes using two different teaching methods, one is traditional, the other is new, that is, the teaching method that uses schemata theory.For the experiment reading materials, they are made up of textbooks of New Horizon College English and some other reading materials. At the beginning of the first semester, the former test was given; at the end of the next semester, the latter given. At the same time, another two tests were also conducted to show that different types of schema have different functions in improving students reading ability. During this year, in the experimental class, the author of the present paper tried every means to activate the students'pre-existing schemata and construct their non-existing schemata according to different reading materials. After nearly one year's training, the author collected the data of the tests and questionnaires, which were analyzed by T-test of SPSS 17.0. The results show that the scores of students in experimental class are much higher than those of control class, and the new teaching method is far better than the traditional one, for the students'reading skills, reading abilities and their interest of learning English have been greatly improved.In the end, the thesis restates the findings of the study and its pedagogical implications. The author also lists the limitation of the present study and some suggestions for the future further study.