An Empirical Study On The Application Of The Schema Theory To English Teaching In Vocational Colleges

As a world language, English plays an indispensable part in society,which makes more and more demands on its people for their Englishcompetence, especially with the development of global village. Therefore, itis crucial for English learners to acquire various kinds of English skills,among which reading plays an important role. Thus, English teachers need totake command of some proper teaching strategies for students to developtheir reading ability. Strategy varies according to different teaching tasks. Itis of great importance to find a proper approach to reading teaching. Schematheory, which is an interactive reading model, is regarded as an effective wayfor English teachers to teach students’ reading ability. Learners guided byschema theory will benefit a lot. In schema theory, readers’ previousknowledge about the topic of the reading material should be activated, andthey can establish mental links with the material. Meanwhile, their interestsin the material they are reading should be aroused and they will read it with aclear purpose, which can help them to learn more from the material. In thisthesis, an experiment has been carried out to improve the efficiency ofschema theory in English reading teaching in vocational colleges. However, some problems still exist in the application. Students, who are afraid ofoffering wrong or even ridiculous guesses, always keep silent in theclassroom. It is an urgent problem that should be solved efficiently.Moreover, sometimes teachers may meet with unknown words when they tryto answer the predictions raised by students. It is hard for them to deal withsuch situation. Even though in prediction there are many unforeseeableproblems, if teachers face them with courage and new ideas, these problemswill function as improvement for both teachers and students. As an effectivemodel of reading, schema theory should be paid great attention by bothteachers and students to develop their reading ability.This thesis includes five chapters. Chapter One is introduction, in which,the significance of the application of schema theory to English readingteaching in vocational colleges is introduced.Chapter Two is literature review and theoretical foundations. Thedefinition and classification of schemata will be put forward. Meanwhile,some conceptions related to reading are also discussed in this chapter.Chapter Three states the research design in detail, including the objectives,subject, and the experiment process, etc. of the research. And some problemsand respective solutions appearing during the application of the theory are mentioned in this chapter.Chapter Four aims to giving some suggestions gained from this researchto future English reading teaching in vocational colleges.The last part is conclusion, summarizing the research findings and thelimitations of this experiment.