Application Of Schema Theory In English Reading Teachin Of Junior Middle School

In China, every student has to learn English, English examination is an essential part forentering a higher school. In middle school English learning, students are required to masterfour basic skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Reading is the foundation ofmastering a language and also a main tool to gain information. Reading comprehension takesan important part in high school entering examinations. At present there is a tendency in theEnglish reading teaching, which lays much emphasis on grammar focus and language pointsthan on students’ understanding of the whole passage. This teaching approach neglects thedevelopment of students’ reading skill and language application ability. Students know littleabout English cultural background knowledge, and they lack the training of reading strategies.These result in students’ low reading abilities.Schema theory has been applied in China’s college English teaching for a long time; alarge number of research works has been carried out to the study about the application ofschema theory in reading. However, most of them are limited in the theoretical layer andstudents in middle schools are short of training under the guidance of schema theory. Thispaper aims to study the feasibility of applying schema theory to junior middle school Englishteaching. Research questions are: whether students can become effective and efficient readersafter the application of schema theory; whether students’ reading speed can be improved bypredicting the main content based on the titles, headlines and passage structure; whether thereading teaching based on schema theory help students develop a good reading habit andarouse their reading interest?The author carried out an experiment in Jun Mahe No.1Middle School, Xixia county,which lasts for three months. The author chose two parallel classes students as subjects, one was the experimental class, and the other was the control class. Each class has50students.The author firstly did a questionnaire and a reading test before the experiment. From theresults of the questionnaire and pre-test, it was found out that there was no big differencebetween students’ reading levels and their attitudes toward reading, and their reading habits aswell as reading methods in the two classes. According to their scores, students were dividedinto three groups: the high score group, the intermediate group and the low score group. Therewere respectively3students,35students and12students in each group in the control class,students’ mean score was25.8526. And there were respectively3students,36students and11students in each group in the experimental class before the experiment, their mean score was25.8750. From this we could see there was no big difference of students’ reading level in thetwo classes before the experiment. After the experiment, the author also carried out aquestionnaire and a test. It was questionnaire two and the post-test. The questions inquestionnaire two included the questions in questionnaire one and another question aboutstudents’ attitude toward the teaching method based on schema theory. From the results ofthem, it was found that students in the experimental class all thought that this teaching methodwas helpful for the improvement of their English reading ability. And students were dividedinto three groups according to their scores as the same. There were respectively17students inthe high group,26students in the intermediate group and7students in low group in thecontrol class, and their mean score was28.9395. But there were respectively33students,13students and4students in each group in the experimental class, and their mean score was31.5043after the experiment. We could see clearly from these results that students’ readinglevels had made a bigger improvement than that in the control class.Schema-oriented teaching method was applied in the experimental class, while theconventional old teaching method was used in the control class. The main purpose of thisexperiment was finding the relationship between schema theory and reading comprehension. The author wanted to explore whether schema-oriented teaching approach can improvestudents’ reading ability by activating their prior schemata and building new schemata,whether this kind of teaching method can improve students’ reading ability and reading speed,and whether it can arouse students’ interests on English reading. The data from the experimentproven that reading teaching based on schema theory can improve students’ reading abilityand reading speed, it can help students develop their reading interest and positive emotions.This study has theoretical values for Junior Middle School English reading teaching on theone hand, and it has practical values for junior middle school English teaching on the otherhand.