Providing And Activating Background Knowledge And English Reading Instructions In Senior High School

Reading is an essential skill for the EFL students. Accounting for nearly 30% of the NMET paper, reading comprehension has always been a focus for the English teaching in Senior High School. Despite the time spent on the training of reading comprehension, the results are disproportionally unsatisfactory. We find students, most of whom read just for testing, totally unmotivated and fail to experience the joy of reading. While there are teachers who try to explore new reading approaches, their focus is still on the linguistic content. In models where students are perceived as only passive receivers of knowledge, it is hardly possible to envisages improvement in reading comprehension on the part of students. Thus, how to help the students become good and efficient readers has become an urgent problem that necessitates close examinations.In the last 30 years, an important contribution to the research on reading has been the Schema Theory, where the importance of background knowledge is essentially underscored. Studies by reading research scholars have demonstrated that background knowledge can facilitate reading comprehension. However, there are some limitations, too. This thesis seeks to explore a new teaching model based on the activation of background knowledge, but without sacrificing the training of basic language skills. A four-month experiment is therefore conducted involving 80 subjects from senior middle schools, and pre-test, post-test, questionnaires and interviews are designed to test the validity of the experiment. The control group,39 students, are taught in the traditional teaching model, whereas in the experimental group, new teaching model is utilized. The results show that through pre-reading, building and activating background knowledge by the teacher can facilitate the students' reading comprehension. Using some appropriate reading materials, the students themselves can build and activate their background knowledge, which is conducive to the improvement of their reading competence.