Schema Theory And English Reading Teaching In Chinese Junior Middle Schools

In English learning, students are required to master four basic language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Reading is a complex intelligent activity and a psychological process of gaining information from the written language. Though it may be difficult to single out only one language skill that is more important than the others, if we make a choice, Reading teaching possesses an important position in Junior Middle School English teaching. Carrell claimed that the most important purpose to learn a foreign language is to read. The ability to read is acknowledged to be the most stable and durable of the foreign language modalities. However, it is very difficult for students to improve reading comprehension in an efficient way. Besides the vocabulary and grammar, students are lack of culture knowledge, science knowledge, and geography knowledge and so on.Schema theory can data back to the 1960s, when Goodman first put forward the top-down processing theory, but it has only been about twenty years since it was introduced into China. From then on, a large amount of research work has been carried out to study and test its relations with EFL reading teaching, most of which, however, is only restricted within the theoretical layer and cannot make much sense in the actual teaching practice, and most of researches on new teaching approaches are college bound in China, to popularize schema-oriented instruction may take some time. Owing to this, this paper aims to explore the feasibility of applying schema theory to the teaching practice in Junior Middle Schools.In order to find out whether the widely known schema theory and its instruction model can be applied effectively in junior middle school students, an experiment is introduced to testify the effect of schemata on students'reading. The result of the experiment proves the importance of schema theory. And the experiment carried in Zhigongzidi Middle School, conducted from September to December, 2008. In this research the author adopted the schema-oriented teaching method, aiming to promote schema activation and schema building in English reading instruction.Two classes were selected randomly from Grade Three. Schema-oriented teaching method was applied in the experimental class (Class One), while the traditional method was used in the control class (Class Two). Data collection involved both scores of pre-test and post-test, and the data was analyzed by SPSS. The data analysis is focused on 1) the differences between experimental class and the control class before and after the experiment. 2) The differences between the scores of pre-test and post-test of high-score group/ low-score group.The study proved that junior middle students could improve their reading ability rapidly after the teacher adopted schema-oriented classroom activities, and the teacher could master the skills of activating and extending students'schemata quite successfully if the training procedures were structured clearly. Both low-score group and high-score group in the same class could benefit greatly from schema-oriented teaching method.In conclusion, the thesis combines the detailed study on schema theory with an experimental research, illustrating the fact that schema theory plays a directive role in English reading.