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

Teaching English reading has always been an important aspect in high schools and also a hard-nut to crack. For a long time, under the influence of the traditional pedagogy, teaching process is sentence-based. As a result, the students ignore the learning, accumulating and applying of the schemata knowledge, which is closely related to the materials. The writer of this thesis, with the achievements in reading studies, from the schemata theory, mainly explore that the innovation of reading comprehension teaching is quite necessary.This paper consists of five chapters:Chapter One is the introduction which states the necessity of the innovation of reading comprehension teaching.Chapter Two is one of the main parts of this dissertation, which gives a brief account of the theories of English reading, including the concepts of reading, three models of reading process. Besides, it shows one of the most efficient reading models is the interactive reading model, in which the schemata knowledge is not only necessary but also important.Chapter Three is another main part of the dissertation. It involves the different definitions of schema, which fall into three categories. They are the linguistic schema, the content schema, the rhetorical schema and along with its three functions in the process of reading. They are predicting reading materials, selecting reading materials, processing and consolidating information.Chapter Four is the presentation of the reading comprehension teaching in high schools, which shows the disadvantages of traditional pedagogy. Therefore, the solution to it is mentioned by employing the Schema Theory. Furthermore, a reading teaching model of a text is offered, which shows how to use schemata theory in three periods: before reading, during reading, after reading.Chapter Five is the last part of this thesis .It is an experiment conducted in two classes using two different teaching methods, one is traditional, the other is new. And the conclusion is drawn from the experiment that the teaching method that uses schemata theory seems better.