Psychological Analysis Of Novel-reading Comprehension And The Development Of Novel-reading Ability -from The Perspective Of Schema Theory

As for most second language learners, reading comprehension is very difficult. There are various factors which influence reading comprehension. The paper bases on schema theory and tries to discuss second-year English majors'psychological activities and improve their novel-reading ability during the process of novel-reading.This paper reviews three models of reading, the bottom-up model, the top-down model and the interactive model; it introduces the basic concepts of schema theory and three types of schemata, linguistic schemata, content schemata and formal schemata. This paper shows the teaching effects of schemata-oriented teaching method in the background of the achievements made by other researchers abroad and at home. It points out some problems of reading comprehension in current situation; it focuses on second-year English majors who study in Haihua department of Liaoning Normal University, analyzes their psychological activities in novel-reading process with the application of schema theory, and tries to develop their novel-reading ability.This paper mainly studies on three research questions:(1) Which factors influence the effect of novel-reading comprehension? (2) What are students'psychological activities during the process of novel-reading? How do these psychological activities relate to schema theory? (3) Can schema-oriented teaching method improve students'ability in novel-reading comprehension? This research lasts 17 weeks and adopts several research methods, including questionnaire, interview, pre-test and post-test. The data of pre-test shows that students in the experimental class and the control class are at approximately same level. The author makes the research on the experimental class by interview and questionnaire, discusses the factors' influence on students'novel-reading, and analyzes their psychological activities in the application of schema theory. The collected data shows that the effect of reading comprehension can be influenced by the students'inadequate linguistic knowledge, lack of background knowledge, and inactive participation. The representation of students' psychological activities can be described as they are accustomed to read word by word and sentence by sentence rather than scan quickly, they seldom associate the writer's background knowledge and literary knowledge with understanding the novel, and they pay less attention to the text structure and so on. Thus, they understand the novel on the basis of linguistic schemata and pay attention to the meaning of words and sentences, whereas content schemata and formal schemata are usually neglected. It will influence the effect of novel-reading comprehension. Focusing on these problems, the experimental class adopts schema-oriented teaching method while the control class adopts traditional teaching method. Besides, the author explains a novel selected from Contemporary College English Reading Book 3, which is conducted with schema-oriented teaching method and adopted in the experimental class. After 17 weeks, the author makes a comparison between the control class and the experimental class, the result of post-test shows that the scores of the experimental class are obviously higher than that of the control class, therefore, schema-oriented teaching method can improve students'novel-reading ability.This research indicates that students'psychological activities restrict and influence their reading ability. Students'schemata can't be completely activated because of improper reading strategies. Therefore, it's very hard to improve their reading ability. Schema theory puts emphasis on activating and constructing students'various schemata in their mind, and the ability of students in the experimental class has been developed a lot. This study pays attention to the interaction between the students and the text, puts emphasis on activating and constructing the students'linguistic schemata, content schemata, formal schemata, and tries to narrow the gap between the students and the writer of a certain text during novel-reading process. What's more, the author puts forward some detailed teaching strategies on the basis of schema theory, which are feasible and effective in novel-reading class, such as introduce the writer of the novel, introduce related literary knowledge about the content of the text, predict the content of the text according to the title, work out text structure, analyze the characters, etc. Meanwhile, the author points out some limitations of this research.