The Application Of Schema Theory To English Reading Teaching In High Schools

Based on systematic experiments and research, this thesis reports a study in the high school, how to apply schema theory to English reading teaching in class.Teaching English reading has always been an important aspect in high schools and also a hard-nut to crack. Reading is both the centre of foreign language learning and a learning measure. It is by far the most important of the four skills. Teaching English reading is currently the focus of much concern. However, a great deal has been done in this aspect indeed, we are aware that many students, after learning English for years, often end in failure in their comprehension when asked to read a passage. As teachers, we should constantly study theories about teaching and put them into practice for our reference in order to make our teaching more effective.Now, reading theories and practice have seen dramatic improvements because of our growing understanding and accepting of the developments in psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistic and language teaching. Reading was first viewed as a rather passive decoding process. Later, people find that reading is not a passive decoding process, but an active psychological guessing game and an"interactive"process. No matter whether the process is"bottom-up","top-down"or"the interactive process", readers can't arrive at comprehension without their schematic knowledge. In fact, it is the readers'semantic and schematic knowledge working interactively together that make them understand the meaning of a text (Widdowson, 1984).In this thesis, the author applies schema theory to English reading teaching in class. Schema theory can be used before reading, in the middle of reading and after reading. And the author made an attempt to use the three-step English reading teaching model in English reading classes. That is to say, in the process of English reading teaching, teachers should activate the schema in the pre-reading step, guide students to comprehend the schema in the while-reading step and consolidate the schema in the post-reading step. By carefully designing the activities of the three steps in the English teaching reading, teachers are able to activate, comprehend and consolidate students'schema, resulting in students'effective reading.The thesis is composed of six chapters. The first chapter states the purpose and significance of the experiment. The second chapter is about literature review. The third chapter states the three types of schemata and the correlations between schema theory and English reading comprehension. In the fourth chapter, the author illustrates the approaches of the three-step English reading teaching model. In the fifth chapter, the author makes an experiment to examine the effect of the three-step English reading teaching model. The conclusions have been drawn from the data analysis that the experimental methodology had a significant effect on improving the students'reading comprehension. The sixth chapter arrives at a conclusion. It indicates the three-step English reading teaching model is beneficial in English reading classes. And still, there are some restrictions in the three-step English reading teaching model.After the training of the three-step English reading teaching model, most of the students from the experimental group had more confidence in themselves as EFL readers, the students'English reading comprehension has been clearly improved, whcih proves that the teaching model is effective. Therefore, one task of the English teachers is to make the students be aware of activating the appropriate schemata and help the students to bridge the gap between new schemata and existing schemata.