The Effect Of Providing And Activating Background Knowledge On Reading Comprehension Of Senior High School Students

Reading is an essential and important skill for students of English as a foreign language, and in senior high middle school, improving students' reading comprehension ability is clearly one of the most important components of English teaching. However, during three years' study, many senior high school students have not obviously improved in English reading. Instead, more and more students become less and less interested in English learning. They can't gain happiness from reading. They read just for testing. Many senior high school English teachers face many challenges, one of which is that many students in senior high are not active with the text and they don't know how to use the background knowledge and build it consciously to understand a text. Many students begin to read a selection without identifying or thinking about the topic beforehand. This means that they are probably not aware that what they already know is an essential factor in understanding the material to be read. Although they spend much time on English reading, the result is not satisfactory. So far as, more and more researchers and teachers are focusing on the solutions to the problem.Since the 1930s, the effectiveness of the background knowledge has been emphasized in the Schema Theory. Researchers are getting to realize that the readers must have the background knowledge related with the reading text in order to improve reading comprehension. This paper reviewed the literature of the Schema Theory. It also reviewed the literature of the previous research. Based on these theory...