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

Reading is an extremely useful skill and plays an extraordinarily important role in both second language acquisition and international communication and cooperation. The New English Curriculum Standards (2001) emphasizes strongly on developing students' reading abilities, techniques and strategies. However, the traditional teaching of reading based on grammar-translation has been prevailing. It views the EFL reading as a passive decoding process, in which new words, phrases and even sentence patterns are taken as discrete language points and elaborated upon by the teacher; however the gist of the text is usually overlooked. This kind of teaching method inhibits students' reading performance and frustrates students' initiative.Schema theory emphasizes that reading comprehension is an interactive process between the reader and the text itself. A reader can use schemata to understand the relationships among pieces of information and to fill in information that is not mentioned explicitly. Supporters of this view argue that a main determinant of the knowledge individuals can obtain from the act of reading is the knowledge they already possess. Guided by this view the main aim of the current study investigates the effects of background knowledge on reading comprehension of English as Foreign Language for High School students.The traditional reading model maintains to read by using "bottom-up", a passive decoding method, i.e. the readers can easily obtain the complete meaning of the text only by reading word by word and sentence by sentence. With the development of applicative linguistics and psychological linguistics, people find reading is not a process of passive decoding but an active process of "guessing-check" ( Goodman, 1967), i.e..Top-down Model. Later artificial intelligent expert Rumelhart claimed that reading is the process when both the Bottom-up and Top-down models interact each other and process the character information at the same time. That is called Interactive Model. No matter which reading model should be taken, it is very difficult for us to understand the text without the background knowledge and schema knowledge interacting each other. We also call it Schema Theory.This dissertation is mainly to introduce an effective reading approach—Interactive model, and its application to the teaching in Senior High School. Based on the careful analysis of the nature of reading process and the comparison of the three approaches to reading (the bottom-up model, the top-down model and the interactive model), it comes to a conclusion that the interactive approach to teach English reading in Senior High School. It suggests that during the reading process, the focus should be put both on decoding the text and on active guessing and predicting, activating the systemic and schematic knowledge of the reader, with the bottom-up and top-down strategies functioning interactively in order to improve the learners' reading ability and their ability of using the English language.At the end of the dissertation, an experimental study of the application of interactive approach is presented, in order to assess its achievements in the respects of language competence and comprehension abilities through the comparison with the grammar-translation method.This dissertation consists of five chapters: Chapter One Introduction, Chapter Two Literature Review: schema theory in China and in abroad. Chapter Three Empirical Research Design; Chapter Four Results and Discussion; and finally Chapter Five Conclusioin...