The Influence Of Vocabulary And Background Knowledge On High School Students’ Reading Performance Of Different Literary Styles

For students learning English as a foreign language, reading is acknowledged asthe most fundamental and essential skill among listening, speaking, reading and writing.English reading is a crucial channel for the students in senior high schools to acquireknowledge, accumulate vocabulary, familiarize themselves with sentence patterns anddevelop their writing skill as well. At the same time, how to improve students’ readingability has been the focus for English teachers and students for a long time, and it is asubject which reading researchers exert great efforts to explore both at home and abroad.In different grades of English exams, especially in the college entrance examination inrecent years, reading stands at the top position. The teaching methods have beenimproved a lot nowadays. However, in the areas whose education is relatively backward,most teachers are used to using bottom-up model in reading teaching processes. Thismodel emphasizes more linguistic knowledge than training students’ readingcompetence. Those teachers still teach reading by making students know the languagepoints, from letters to words, phrases, then from phrases to sentences, paragraphs,finally from paragraphs to passages. Actually, this way seriously limits students’ readingabilities. Thus, students’ reading competence is still not improved and their grades at thepart of reading tests are often lower than other parts.Schema theory, which originated in the field of psychology in the study of mentalorganization for storing and retrieving the existing knowledge while dealing with thenew information, has been applied in ESL/EFL learning and has a great effect onreading comprehension. Therefore, for ESL/EFL reading, schema theory has becomenecessary for its capability of balancing interaction between the reader and the writer ina reading process. According to schema theory, readers’ problems are related to theabsence of a certain schema, as well as non-activation of schema. Schema theory bringsa brand new perspective not only to the learning but also the teaching of English readingworldwide.Based on the framework of schema theory, the author tries to make an empiricalresearch on the influence of vocabulary (reflected as linguistic schema), backgroundknowledge (reflected as content schema) and different literary styles (reflected asformal schema) on senior high school students’ reading performance, in order to find thecruxes of reading and difference among the influence of vocabulary and background knowledge on reading performance of different literary styles, so that the paper can tellhow the students and the teachers can overcome the obstacles of reading by establishingrelative schemata and develop reading capacities and other qualities by taking theschema theory-based instruction approach.The participants in the present study are160senior high school students in Xuncounty of Hebi, in Henan Province. All the subjects are strictly selected according totheir usual performances, which are parallel in an intermediate level. Among the160subjects,67are males and93are females. A reading test and a semi-structuredinterview are adopted in this study. Data are collected and processed through descriptivestatistic analysis, Pearson correlation analysis, and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) so asto explore the effects of vocabulary and background knowledge on reading performanceof different literary styles.Based on the analysis of the results, the paper puts forward the conclusion asfollows:1) The importance of vocabulary and background knowledge in readingcomprehension has been verified. Vocabulary and background knowledge are two basicbuilding blocks of a good reading ability, and lack of any of them would undoubtedlylead to low levels of comprehension in reading.2) The role of vocabulary and the roleof background knowledge are different in reading, which are understood moreobjectively.3) There is some significant difference in the effects of vocabulary andbackground knowledge on the reading process when the reading material is narrative,and only combining related vocabulary and background knowledge can the readers readbest.4) There is some significant difference in the effects of vocabulary and backgroundknowledge on the reading process when the reading material is expositive, and eithervocabulary or background knowledge can help the readers a lot.5) There is somesignificant difference in the effects of vocabulary and background knowledge on thereading process when the reading material is argumentative, and background knowledgeplays a more important role than vocabulary.Finally, some tentative discussions are made about the major findings of thepresent study. Besides, pedagogical implications are provided for high school teaching.The key of English reading lies in the proper input of a broader vocabulary and richerbackground knowledge. Therefore, in the teaching of English reading in senior highschools, teachers are required to pay attention to the schema effect on reading ofdifferent literary styles, provide their students with rich background knowledge, andhelp them establish relative schemata in the hope of helping facilitating English learning and teaching practice. The author also touches upon the limitations of the experimentand the suggestions about further study.