The Application Of The Schema Theory To The English Teaching Of College Reading

The concept of schema was first put forward by Kant in 1781. In 1923 Bartlett, an English psychologist, applied and developed schema theory. In the 1970's Rumelhart, an American expert of artificial intelligence, improved the theory and stated that schemata were basically the theory about the people's knowledge. According to schema theory, reading comprehension is an interactive process between the readers'schemata and the information of the texts. When the readers contact the schemata stored in their minds to the information of materials and the two matched together, we can understand the content of the materials. And the schemata of reading comprehension have three category types: linguistic schema, formal schema and content schema.In the past decades, reading comprehension had traditionally been regarded as a passive process. And most teachers emphasized the teaching of linguistic schema and ignored the teaching of the other two schemata. The traditional reading instruction is teacher-centered, which stressed the massive input of exercises to improve the students'reading comprehension. In fact, most students are tired of the traditional instruction. This instruction is time-consuming, ineffective and can't meet the current requirements of the quality education. So it is imperative to reform the traditional reading instruction.This thesis emphasizes the function of the content schema in the reading instruction because it plays a pivotal role in the English reading. The thesis also stresses that the teacher, during the teaching process, should activate the content schema in the class and outside to enhance the reading comprehension. English reading instruction stands a primary position and bears the important task of cultivating the students'reading ability.This thesis, by introducing a teaching case of Integrated Course, demonstrates in detail the teaching experiments which include forty-eight sophomore English majored students in Chi Feng University. The writer divided the two classes into a control class and an experimental class randomly. In the experimental class, the schema-oriented instruction model was adopted and the traditional method was adopted in the control class. The results from the pre-test showed that the two classes had the same level of English proficiency. And after a semester's teaching experiment, we have got the following results: (1) the schema-oriented teaching model is more efficient and popular than the traditional method. (2) schema-oriented teaching plays an active role in promoting the English reading comprehension. (3) the clearer the schemata are, the better the English reading comprehension will be.Therefore, we conclude the usage of schema-oriented teaching model during the reading process can increase the students'reading interest, broaden the students'vision, enhance the awareness of using the reading strategies and cultivate the students'good reading habits.