The Application Of Schema Theory To English Reading Teaching In Feixiang Senior School

Reading is an important way that people acquire knowledge and access to information. For a long time, English reading teaching has always been the most valued subject, but much time and energy spent on reading teaching did not receive the desired results. The reason is that in reading class the focus is on mainly training the students to learn language knowledge. Teachers stress on teaching language points and syntactic structure. And students thought that reading is to memorize vocabulary and language points and to identify the grammatical structure of each sentence. Besides, rural high schools are lack of teaching equipment and teaching resources. There are no more channels for students to learn English except textbooks. Under the pressure of the college entrance examination, students endlessly remember new words and do simulation training. Thus, the students lost interest in reading and the results of English language learning are not ideal. To solve the problem, the fact that the purpose of reading is to cultivate and develop students'reading ability should be known first. And the cultivation of reading ability is also one of the teaching goals set by the National English Curriculum. Taking the above problems into consideration, the author of this paper applies the schema theory to English reading teaching in Feixiang high school. The aim is to improve the teaching of English reading and thus to help students improve their English reading ability.Schema is the"pre-existing knowledge"or"background knowledge"stored in mind. Schema theory emphasizes the role the reader's cultural background knowledge plays in the process of reading comprehension. According to Rumelhart, a schema is an organized body of knowledge, an abstract mental structure that represents some parts of a certain stimulus domain. When reading, readers relate the information of the materials to their relevant background knowledge which has already stored in mind. And they activate the schema in time. The activation of relevant schema can help the students reach comprehension.This thesis, which is composed of six chapters, is an empirical experiment based on schema theory. Chapter One describes the present situation of teaching and learning English reading in Feixiang high school and the purpose of the study. In Chapter Two, the author analyzes the reading theory, the schema theory and the previous researches on applying schema theory to English reading abroad and in China. Chapter Three is the description of the experiment. The experiment is designed to verify whether the schema theory has a positive effect on the development of the students'reading ability. The author uses questionnaire, interview and tests to gather information. Two classes are chosen as the subjects. One is the experimental class and the other is the control class. In Chapter Four, the author analyzes the data collected from the experiment by using SPSS. Chapter Five shows the main findings of the study and implications for English reading teaching. Chapter Six is the conclusion which the author has drawn from the experiment. It also concludes the limitation of the study. After analyzing the data collected from the experiment, a conclusion can be drawn that the schema theory can help to develop the students'reading ability, to encourage them to use reading strategies and to help them form a good reading habit.