An Integrated Application Of Schema Theory, Cohesion And Texture Theory To The Teaching Of EFL Reading At College Level

Reading is one of the most important components of English teaching. The purpose of teaching reading is to develop and enhance students' ability of reading comprehension with the ability of discourse analysis at the centre. This paper reports a project the author has completed in teaching adult associate college students of English intensive reading in a specially-designed discoursal approach, based on schema theory, cohesion and texture theory. The paper illustrates with examples how to teach Integrated Skills of English published by Higher Education Press in this discoursal approach so as to enhance students' reading comprehension and discourse analysis ability. It also reports and analyzes the results of the two-term study on the students involved.The first chapter briefly introduces the status quo of the teaching of reading in adult education in China, analyzing the problems that exist in the reading class and presenting the disadvantages of the traditional method of teaching. To address those problems, the paper suggests teaching reading in a discoursal approach based on schema theory, cohesion and texture theory.The second chapter gives a brief review of the literature on reading which discourse analysis is based on. The first section introduces the three models for reading, namely, bottom-up model, top-down model and the interactive model. The second one focuses on schema theory, pointing out that (Carrell and Eisterhold 1987:220) "the process of interpretation is guided by the principle that every input is mapped against some existing schema and that all aspects of that schema must be compatible with the input information." That is, comprehension is a process of activating or building a schema that gives a good amount of coherent information to what is mentioned in discourse. The third part explains cohesive devices such as reference, substitution and ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion classified by Halliday and Hasan in their book Cohesion in English (1976). The fourth part only touches upon four kinds of text structures: general-specific pattern, matching pattern,...