Enhancing Senior Students' Comprehension Ability To Read Expository Texts By Familiarizing Them With The Text Patterns Of Exposition

In senior middle schools the traditional way of teaching English reading course centres on vocabulary and grammar. Not infrequently do we find in teaching that students are unable to keep track of the theme of a discourse even after they have studied the discourse sentence by sentence. With the implementing of The English Curriculum Standard for Middle Schools (2002), senior middle school students are required to reach a higher level in reading, but in reality reading is a big headache for students, especially, reading passages of exposition is much more difficult for them.Expository texts are generally more difficult to comprehend due to the variety of structures and unfamiliar content(Williams,2005). Jo Ann Piccolo(1987) identified that six types of expository text patterns are useful for teaching purpose , which occur in text materials that students may encounter. So if the students are familiar with the common expository text patterns, they will have fewer problems with comprehension.This thesis is a tentative probe into the relationship between the students' text pattern knowledge of exposition and their reading comprehension ability, based on the schema theory and text pattern knowledge.