Influence Of Pre-reading Activities On Senior Students' English Reading Comprehension

Reading, as one of the five fundamental skills in English learning plays a very important role in EFL acquisition. However, Chinese senior students'reading ability is still not satisfactory. Widdowson (1989) defines reading as a communication activity. Goodman (1967) points out that reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game and it involves an interaction between thought and language. Therefore, reading is an interactive process of communication. According to the concepts of reading, a number of theorists (e.g. Goodman; Smith) have developed interactive theories of reading. While these interactive theories which now dominate reading research and strongly influence teaching practice draw heavily on schema theory.Schema theory has been formulated to account for the role of the reader's background knowledge in language comprehension. A schema (singular), as understood in schema theory, represents generic knowledge. According to schema theory, readers'problems are related to absent or alternate schema, as well as non-activation of schema. In order to solve readers'problems, pre-reading activities should be used to accomplish both goals:building new background knowledge as well as activating existing background knowledge (Carrell,1988b).The author observed many classes and found most of senior students developed bad reading habits and had difficulties in reading. By the form of questionnaire, the author also found that most English teachers in senior high schools had not paid much attention to pre-reading activities and not made full use of pre-reading activities to help their students comprehend the passage; meanwhile senior students knew that background knowledge was very important for their reading, but they didn't know how to get background knowledge and had weak awareness to use pre-reading activities. Therefore this thesis is to study the effect of schemata-oriented pre-reading activities on Chinese senior students'EFL reading comprehension. Based on schema theory, the author sets up a hypothesis that Chinese senior students'EFL reading comprehension really improve after they are given schemata-oriented pre-reading activities related to the reading.The subjects of this study were 100 first-year Chinese senior students from Shaxian No.5 Middle School. Two questionnaires and two tests were involved in this study. Results showed that both English teachers and students lacked the use of schemata-oriented pre-reading activities in their reading classes. Meanwhile, the hypothesis of this study had been tested to be correct. That is, schemata-oriented pre-reading activities could activate Chinese senior students'prior knowledge and had good effects on their EFL reading comprehension. Based on the findings, it is suggested that EFL teachers should pay much attention to pre-reading activities in their reading classes rather than neglect them. It is also implied that EFL teachers should cultivate their students'strong awareness of using schemata-oriented pre-reading activities. The author points out the limitations of this study and makes suggestions for future study in the last part of this thesis.