A Study Of Teaching English Reading Based On Schema Theory In Senior High Schools

Generally speaking, we acquire by eyes90%knowledge and information around the world. Reading,as the main way to input information, is also one of the four basic skills in learning English. Therefore,reading plays the most important role both in English learning and in life.Although students get to know English from their primary school, most of them still have manyquestions during the period of their senior-high-school English learning, especially in English reading. It'surgent for students to improve their reading ability. According to the demand of new curriculum standard,reading ability includes two aspects: reading comprehension and reading speed. Improving readingefficiency is equal to the improvement of reading comprehension rate and speed. The quick and efficientreading not only depends on readers' language proficiency and good reading habit, but also relies on adeptreading skills to a large degree. Therefore, all foreign language teachers need to organize activitiesaccording to the reality in English classes, train the students' reading skills and improve their readingability.This paper tries to raise a kind of solution to relieve the above questions: teaching English readingmethod with the guidance of schema theory. Through class example with the guidance of schema theory,the author sets forth that how a teacher can activate students' related background information, how to urgestudents to build up new schemata, and how to eliminate students' reading obstacles. Moreover, the paperalso explains that schema theory is helpful to improve senior-high-school students' English reading ability.By the means of the experimental research and the questionnaires, this paper tries to elaborate thatthe teaching reading method with the guidance of schema theory can improve clearly students' readingcomprehension grades, arouse students' interests and strengthen students' English learning confidence. Thefollowing is how the experiment goes: the teacher teaches both the experimental class and the control class.The interactive reading model with the aid of schema theory is used in the experimental class, whilegrammar-translation traditional method is adopted in the control class. The author will analyze the chosensample through one term's experiment and with taking the grades of students' reading comprehension asthe data. The author will do the questionnaire twice: the first one before the experiment and the second one after the experiment, which can show the good changes in students' attitudes, confidence and adoptingreading skills by contrasting the results.In chapter one, the author introduces briefly the insolvable contradiction met in the senior highschool teaching reading between teachers and students. The part one also refers to how researchers andteachers select schema theory to guide the teaching reading in order to relieve that contradiction. Chaptertwo includes two parts. The part one introduces several concepts about reading: the nature of reading,reading comprehension and reading activities in classes. The part two analyzes the concept, characteristicsand classification of the schema theory. In this part, the author also shows the advantages of the closecombination between schema theory and teaching reading. The chapter three tests and verifies thehypothesis and writes the class example in detail. The part four discusses the results of the research andconfirms the truth of the hypothesis. The part five sums up major findings, the pedagogical implicationsand limitations of the study.