Influence Of Activating Formal Schemata On EFL Seniors' Reading Comprehension

The aims of a language teaching course are very often defined with reference to the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Of the above four skills, reading is by far the most important for many students. It is certain that if we consider the study of English as a foreign language around the world, that is, the situation in which most English learners find themselves, reading is the main reason why they learn the language. One of the general aims of Senior English Course is to develop students' ability of using language efficiently, especially the reading ability to acquire information, to deal with information, to analyze problems and thus to solve the problems. To form a good ability of using language efficiently, students should try their best to develop their language skills well. The present paper concerns itself with the formal schemata and EFL seniors' reading comprehension ability. An experimental study is designed to test validity of a new teaching method under the formal schema theory. What we want to emphasize in the study is that the conscious activation of formal schemata will influence EFL seniors' reading comprehension.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the necessity of carrying out the research on improving senior middle school students' reading comprehension in the present situation. It first analyses the requirements on English reading in the New English Curriculum Standard made by the Ministry of Education, PRC, in 2003. It also throws light on the reason why the formal schemata previously stored in the students themselves previously should be activated to help them improve their English reading comprehension. In this chapter, a brief introduction to the definition of reading is also made clearly. Then a critical review of the researches on teaching methodology of SL reading abroad and at home is made and the development of the reading models is presented. It is accepted in the thesis by the author that reading is rather an interactive process between two models of information processing than a pure way of bottom-up or top-down processing.Chapter Two is concerned with the history of the development of schema theory. Bartlett views schema as the mental organization of the readers' past experience. A schema is regarded as a highly organized abstract knowledge structure in the minds of human beings. Generally, schemata can be divided into content and formal schemata. Content schemata are related to a text topic or content, which can also be called background knowledge. Formal schemata are concerned about the text structure or textual organization. The two schemata are considered to affect readers' reading comprehension ability. This chapter also talks about the application of schema theory in L1 and L2 situations. These theories make us agree that learners at high school may have already had some knowledge about how texts are organized, but there exists a problem that they can not consciously activate it in their reading process. So at the end of the chapter the author states that it is important to consciously build and activate the knowledge about how texts are organized (formal schemata) in students' reading comprehension.Chapter Three deals with the experimental design. Chapter Four is data analysis. SPSS 11.5 was used to treat the experimental data. Chapter Five is the general discussion and conclusion of the research. After a general discussion based on the experimental result collected and analyzed in Chapter Four, it was claimed that the subjects in Experimental Class did perform much better than those in Controlled Class in reading comprehension after the experiment was systematically conducted. From the data analysis and results, we can find that the experimental class yielded promising results: their progress is significant and stable. In Controlled Class the subjects' progress is not significant, and its developmental process is not stable and unpredictable. From the t-test between groups, we know that two classes almost had an equal start before the experiment was carried out. With the development of time and the different applications in methodology, Experimental Class performed better than Controlled Class. Therefore, the research result is that the activation of EFL seniors' formal schemata will actually facilitate their reading comprehension.