Schema Theory And English Read Comperehension

As is known to all that reading is very important for almost all the people, especially for the students. It is by far the most important of the four skills. Teaching English reading is currently the focus of much concern. However, a great deal has been done in this aspect indeed, we are still aware that many students, after learning English for years, often end in failure about their comprehension when asked to read a passage. As teachers, we should constantly study more theories about teaching and put it into practices for our references in order to make our teaching more effective.During the past 25 years, reading theories and practices had seen dramatic improvements because of our growing understanding and accepting of the developments in psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics and language teaching. Reading was first viewed as a rather passive decoding process. Later, people find that reading is not a passive decoding process, but an active "psycholinguistic guessing game " (Goodman, 1997:135) and an "Interactive" process (Carrell et al,1988) . No matter the process is "Bottom-Up", "Top-Down" or "Interactive" process, readers can't arrive at comprehension without their schematic knowledge. In fact, it is the readers' semantic and schematic knowledge worked interactively together that make them understand the meaning of a text (Widdowson, 1990 ) .This study was an empirical one based on schema theory(especially content schemata). It was about how schema theory could be applied to EFL reading and how we could help the students activate the schemata stored in their minds. It should be emphasized that the experiment was designed to test the influence of a specific training technique based on schema theory for the students' English reading comprehension, but it was not to intended to test the schema theory per se. There are five parts in this thesis. The first part stated the purpose and significance of the experiment; The second part was about literature review; The third part illustrated the correlations between the schema theory and English reading comprehension and how the teacher helped the students activate the schemata stored in the minds; The fourth part was our experimental design; The fifth part was our conclusion, that is, the experimental methodology had a significant effect on improving the students' English reading. We drew theconclusion from the data analyses.Carrell's schema theory has been basically explored in the first language reading and applied in the second language. But there is some relationships between Lland L2 or FL. we should not only understand the developments of second or foreign language reading theories and practices, but also need to learn some theories and practices from first language in order to get useful insight for ESL or EFL reading practices. Schema theory has influenced our college English reading since 1980s, but the relevant research in secondary school is lacking. In view of that, we conducted an experiment in Lanzhou Agriculture School to examine whether it could be used to improve EFL students' reading ability. The subjects were in Grade Two and non-English majors. In the course of experiment, the students predicted what they read according to their schemata to get access to the information.After this study, most of the experimental students expressed more confidence in themselves as EFL readers. One role of the teacher is to make the students be aware of activating the appropriate schemata or guidance them and help them bridge the gap between new schemata and existing schemata.