An Application Of Schema Theory To The EFL Reading In Middle School

The teaching of reading in the EFL class in China is supposed one of the mostimportant tasks in Middle School. The importance of reading in EFL teaching andlearning has been acknowledged. It is well-known that English is learned primarily as a means of gaining information through the written language. And reading provides the most efficient and hence the most important channel of linguistic input through which students improve their linguistic competence. As language is a tool of communication, the tool must be used in communication for successful language learning. Therefore, the teaching of reading is not only to develop linguistic competence, but also to cultivate students' communicative competence.In spite of the priority given to reading among the four basic skills, students' reading ability is not satisfactory. The traditional teaching of reading based on grammar-translation has been prevailing. This teaching model possesses some demerits that inhibit the development of the students' reading proficiency and reading skills rather than promote them. It views that the EFL reading as a passive decoding process, in which news words, phrases and even sentence patterns are taken as discrete language points and elaborated upon by the teacher but the gist of the text is usually overlooked. From this bottom-up passive fashion of reading arises the complaint that students " can not see the wood for the trees". As a result, students are linguistically competent in part, but can not communicate effectively and appropriately. Their communicative ability can not be developed. This way of teaching severely frustrates students' initiative and restrains the development of students' potential and creativity.Up till now a large number of researches have been probed into reading's nature and characteristics. Currently, one of the prevailing perspectives toward the analysis of reading process is schema theory. In belief, schema is made up of past experience or background knowledge. In the late 1960's, D.E.Rumelhart did a lot of research, and developed the conception of schema into a comprehensive theory. The interaction of...