The Application Of Scheme Theory In Senior Middle School English Reading Teaching

Reading is a very important part in English teaching. It is a main way for students toacquire knowledge, accumulate vocabulary, get familiar with the sentence patterns andcultivate writing skills as well as a vital channel to obtain information in English. Therefore,more and more attention has been paid to English reading teaching and student’s readingability cultivation. However, due to the influence of traditional teaching methods, manyteachers misunderstand the meaning of reading comprehension, which has led students tofocusing only on learning vocabulary, grammar and other linguistic knowledge. So how toeffectively train the students’ English reading ability is an issue to be resolved in high schoolEnglish teaching.The concept of "schemata" was first put forward in late1600’s, but it was finallytheorized in1980’s. Since then it has gradually become one of the most popular theories in thesecond language acquisition studies. Researches at home and abroad show that schematatheory has an important effect on English reading. On the basis of previous achievements inthe theory of reading, the author, from the perspective of schema theory, explores the schematheory and its concrete application in the English reading teaching.The purpose of this thesis is to improve senior middle-school students’ English readingability with a schema-oriented teaching method. The author carried out an experimental studyin Zhang Zhou No.1Senior High School, which was conducted from September,2011toDecember,2011. Two classes of the subjects were chosen respectively as the control groupand the experimental group for their same level of English proficiency. In the experimentalclass, schema-oriented instruction model was adopted while traditional teaching method wasutilized as usual in the control class.And then a well-constructed test, on the basis of schema theory, is held. By comparingthe test results of two groups of subjects: the hypotheses which will be tested statistically inthe study are:(1) the experimental class can acquire higher scores than the control class in thetest after the experiment.(2) the results of the experimental class will be significantlyimproved after the experiment.The whole thesis contains six chapters:In Chapter One, the author introduces the current situation and problems of high schoolEnglish reading teaching, indicating the significance of this study.Chapter Two reviews the researches on schema theory at home and abroad.Chapter Three discusses the related schema theories, including the definition, thedeveloping situation and classification of Schema and its functions in the readingcomprehension; the related reading theories, including the definition of reading, the process of reading and three reading models; the relationship between Schema Theory and readingcomprehension, and also the role of Schema Theory in reading comprehension.In Chapter Four, the author presents an experiment and statistically analyzes the result ofthe experiment.Chapter Five discusses some enlightenment got from schema theory and methods ofschema reading teaching.Chapter Six draws a conclusion. It summarizes the whole paper and at the same timepoints out the significance and limitations of this thesis.