The Application Of The Schemata Theory To The English Reading Teaching In Senior High Schools

Based on systematic experiments and research, this paper reports a study in the setting of senior high schools, how to apply the Schema Theory into English reading class.Teaching English reading has always been an important aspect in high schools and also a hard-nut to crack. For a long time, students reading comprehension skill is quite limited by the traditional way of teaching, and due to the lack of schema knowledge on the learners' side, the whole teaching process is sentence-based. Teachers keen on teaching single words, phrases or grammatical points on a sentence-to-sentence basis, as a result, students often face great obstacles in the comprehension of the text as a whole. Therefore, the implement of the Schema Theory to improve the learners' reading comprehension seems to be very important in teaching high school students. This paper aims at the practice of the Schema Theory in the hope of guiding English-reading teaching in high schools.In this article, the definition and ramifications of the Schema Theory are presented to the readers. The Schemata fall into three categories. They are the linguistic schema, the content schema, the rhetorical schema, and along with its four functions in the process of reading. They are selecting reading materials, getting information, processing information in the course of reading, interpreting the information given, choosing reading strategies and making adjustment.The Schema characters of students in high schools show great difference in the degrees of extent, development and activation in terms of the linguistic schema. Readers possess the rich content schema, which is also accurate and fully-developed when it comes to the Chinese language. As for the English language, the rhetorical schema formed in the students is quite different from that of the Chinese language. Students are under-trained in reading strategies and poor in the Schema Theory. Inspirations are drawn from the Schema Theory, which can serve reading -teaching. They can be used before, in the middle of and after reading. Namely, before reading, we practice prediction and inference; while reading, we practice information processing; and after reading, we practice consolidation and memorization.Conclusions are drawn from the data achieved through experiments. Of the three schemata, the linguistic schema provides the foundation for understanding a text literally, the content schema the basis for understanding its content, and the rhetorical the application of the content. These three schemata are inter-related and each indispensable. Four things should be done in the course of teaching and learning reading so that students can very well improve their reading comprehension ability, grasp reading skills and have a linguistic schema, and in this way they can also enlarge their reading to enrich the content schema, tell the different styles of writing to perfect the rhetorical schema and guide the students to pick up reading skills and strategies.This research provides some useful information for the teaching of English reading in high schools, which can help to set up proper reading strategies both from the perspectives of the teachers and students. With reading strategies in hand, the students' readingcomprehension will be greatly improved. In short, language teachers can have a better performance in their teaching.