An Empirical Study Of English Reading Teaching In Junior High School Based On The Application Of Schema Theory

Reading is a complex intelligent activity and a psychological process of gaininginformation from the written language. Though it may be difficult to single out only onelanguage skill that is more important than the others, if we make a choice, Readingteaching possesses an important position in Junior High School English teaching.Carrell holds that reading is the most important purpose of learning a foreign language.The ability to read is acknowledged to be the most stable and durable of the foreignlanguage modalities. However, it is very difficult for junior high school students toimprove reading comprehension in an efficient way. Besides the vocabulary andgrammar, they are lack of culture knowledge, science knowledge, and geographyknowledge and so on.Schema theory can be dated back to the1960s, but it has only been over thirtyyears since it was introduced into China. From then on, a large amount of research workhas been carried out to study and test its relations with EFL reading teaching, most ofwhich, however, is only restricted within the theoretical layer and cannot make muchsense in the actual high school teaching practice, especially junior high school, and mostof researches on new teaching approaches are college bound in China, to popularizeschema-oriented instruction may take some time. Owing to this, this paper aims toexplore the feasibility of applying schema theory to the teaching practice in Junior HighSchools.In order to find out whether the widely known schema theory and its instructionmodel can be applied effectively in junior high school students, an experiment isintroduced to testify the effect of schemata on students’ reading. The result of theexperiment proves the importance of schema theory. And the experiment was carried inYanjin Middle School in Xinxiang, conducted from September to December,2011. Inthis research the author adopted the schema-oriented teaching method, aiming topromote schema activation and schema building in English reading instruction. Two classes were selected randomly from Grade Nine. Schema-oriented teachingapproach was used in EC, and while in CC, the author applied the traditional teachingapproach. Data collection involved both scores of pre-text and post-test, and the datawas analyzed by SPSS. The data analysis was focused on1) the differences betweenexperimental class and the control class before and after the experiment.2) Thedifferences between the scores of pre-test and post-test of high-score group/low-scoregroup.The study proves that junior high students could improve their reading abilityrapidly after the teacher adopts schema-oriented classroom activities, and the teachercould master the skills of activating and extending students’ schemata quite successfullyif the training procedures were structured clearly. Both low-score group and high-scoregroup in the same class could benefit greatly from schema-oriented teaching method.In conclusion, the thesis combines the detailed study on schema theory with anexperimental research, illustrating the fact that schema theory plays a directive role inEnglish reading...