Schema Theory As A Reading Strategy In English Teaching In Senior High Schools

People acquire knowledge by means of reading. Reading strategy is one of the important learning strategies that students must strengthen and is one of the objectives of New English Criteria in senior high schools. But the fact is that many senior high school students' reading ability is far blow where it should be during three years' study. They don't know what to read and how to read. They don't know how to use the background knowledge, build and activate it consciously to understand the content of the text. Although they spend much time in reading, they can not achieve the satisfactory result. Up to now, more and more researchers and teachers focus on the solutions to the problem. As an English teacher, the author chooses the senior high school students as subjects and designs the experiment focusing largely on reading strategies to explore the following questions:1) Can schema theory used as a reading strategy be trained in senior high school learners?2) Can students activate their schemata by themselves once having learned the strategy?Five sections are included in the paper:Chapter One gives a brief introduction of studies related to the reading teaching, analyzes the problems that exist in reading class and suggests the reading strategy teaching.Chapter Two presents a literature review. First, it introduces schema theory, pointing out that the process of interpretation is guided by the principle that every input is mapped against some existing schema and that al aspects of that schema must be compatible with the input information. Then, present the close relationship between schema theory and reading comprehension. Point out the background knowledge plays an important role in reading comprehension. Next, introduce three reading models, namely bottom-up model, up-down model and interactive models. Finally, explain the knowledge about reading strategy. Reading strategies may turn into procedural knowledge with repeated practice and benefit students in improving their reading ability.Chapter Three gives an account of the experiment. Two classes participate in the experiment. Before the study, the author conducts the questionnaire investigation and pre-test. Based on results of them, the author makes study plan and adopts different teaching methods in reading. For the experimental class, the author makes the strategy-based instruction and reading strategies training on the basis of schema theory, illustrates with examples how to activate their relevant background knowledge and make use of them to predict and infer the incoming information. While for the control class, the author focuses on the vocabulary and grammar explanations. After the experiment, the author first gives the students of two classes a post-test. Then an informal interview is given to some students of experimental class as a complementary way to check their reading strategy use in reading.Chapter Four is concerned with the data collection and analysis. The data analysis of the questionnaire and pre-test suggests that two classes have no significant difference before the study starts. But the result of post-test indicates that there is a significant difference between two classes. The students of experimental class make greater progress from the beginning to the end than those of control class. Because there are some questions are used to check about strategy use such as prediction or inference in post-test paper. We can infer the students of experimental class have learned the reading strategies and can apply them to finish tasks. Later the author interviews some students of experimental class and confirms it.Chapter Five draws the conclusion. The experiment achieves some success and provides some implications for our future teaching. But it still has some limitations.