A Probe Into Schema-based English Newspaper And Periodical Reading In High Schools

With English newspaper and periodical reading (ENP reading) as the subject, the thesis probes into the necessity and possibility of popularizing ENP reading in language teaching as an elective course in high schools. According to the requirement in different levels of language skills, which is stated by English Curriculum Criteria, high school students should be able to read appropriate materials from ENP. Besides the object to be learners autonomy, effective resource strategies should also be developed, say, getting information resources from newspapers, magazines, broadcast, TV, internet and so on, with the aim of broadening knowledge and expending vision. For that, the author makes the schema theory the base of the thesis, attempts to advocate activating and using schemata to build reading strategies in English teaching and probe how to help students to solve reading problems that may occur because of the lack of relevant background schemata. It suggests that ENP reading and teaching should focus on how to build or activate their background schemata, content schemata, discourse schemata and language schemata. It's argued that in the process of building schema-based strategies, the lack of related knowledge schemata in one's L1 provides the chance to construct knowledge schemata related to ENP. Furthermore, supplementary reading through other media can consolidate and expand those knowledge schemata of ENP in return. Also, the thesis believes that once combined with the features of ENP, the materials can be the area where students can develop their useful skills in information-surveying, content-analyzing, vocabulary-memorizing, culture-comparing and writing-imitating. In sum, theories count in practice. Aiming at developing students'integrated pragmatic competence, the author recommends a few tentative proposals or models which can be instructive for teaching practice. These models are guided by certain appropriate teaching approaches like task-based approach, and so on. Reading competence development is viewed as the core, while cooperative writing competence, news listening competence development and communicative speaking competence development as the additional. Of course, the learning strategies and teaching models mentioned in it are still to be studies and developed. Luckily, action research in ENP reading has been started, and more data resources will be provided for the research in the coming future.