The Application Of Schema Theory In The Teaching Of English Reading For High Schools

Reading, as a source of comprehensible input, plays an important part in second or foreign language acquisition. The New English Curriculum Standards lays strong emphasis on developing students'reading abilities, techniques and strategies. Therefore, it is very important for high school teachers to help the students improve their reading comprehension. Though teachers and students in high schools spend a lot of time and effort in reading, the result is not satisfactory.Much research has been done by international experts on reading theory from the viewpoints of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. Both definition of reading comprehension and the process of reading emphasize the importance of the background knowledge of readers. Although many researchers have studied about schema theory, it seems that no one has attempted to show how many kinds of content schemata are there in reading. So in this thesis, the author investigates the reading materials of the MENT papers in the past 15 years, from 1995 to 2009, and made a summary of the content schema. The result shows that the part of reading comprehension of the college test papers has become tougher and tougher. To improve students'reading ability, it is quite necessary for teachers, while teaching, to help construct and activate students'content schemata as well as linguistic schemata and formal schemata.In order to explore the relationship between background knowledge and reading comprehension, and to test whether reading can be effectively improved through the instruction of schema theory, the author attempts to apply schema theory to the SEFC reading class, and an experiment is conducted in this study and some data are collected through the pre-test and the post-test; in addition, much valuable information are acquired through the questionnaire survey and the interview.Studies have shown that after the training on schema theory, students'English reading comprehension ability has improved, and at the same time their vocabulary has been enlarged, their interest and self-confidence in reading have been enhanced, and thus the two hypotheses that the author has made are supported.