The Application Of The Schema Theory To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

The concept of "schemata" was first put forward in the late seventeenth century, and it was theorized in the1980s. Since then it has gradually become one of the most popular theories in second language acquisition studies. Researchers abroad and at home state that the schema theory has an important effect on English learning. Scholars at home have made a few researches on the application of the schema theory to teaching. This thesis is organized to instruct English reading teaching in Senior High by means of the schema theory in order to find an effective way to improve the students’reading comprehension.In traditional reading classes, teachers usually guide the students in learning a text slowly, explaining new words and phrases and analyzing the grammatical structures if necessary. Great efforts have been made to improve the learners’ reading ability, but the results are far from satisfactory.The Schema theory highlights that reading is an interactive process between readers and texts. Students can have chances to participate actively in the reading process, not just to remember new words and grammar points by rote. Students can employ schemata to follow the relationships among pieces of information and to fill in information that is not mentioned clearly. Schema theory lays theoretical foundations for prediction and decoding in the process. There are three kinds of schema:linguistic schemata, formal schemata and content schemata. According to schema theory, readers use both bottom-up and top-down approaches to interpret a text. In the process, readers should activate their schemata to interpret new messages. Readers’ schemata determine what they comprehend, how well they comprehend and whether they can make an adequate comprehension.In order to test the hypothesis that the application of the schema theory to reading teaching can cultivate the students’ interests, develop their reading skills, and help them comprehend the reading materials better, the author conducted an experiment with two classes as the subjects from Grade One of No.55Senior High School, Heping District of Tianjin. In the daily teaching, the students of the two classes were all exposed to the same reading materials; but only the experiment class was given schema-oriented instruction; while the students were taught in the traditional style in the control class. Tests and questionnaires were used to collect data and analysis was done on the differences in achievements in the pre-test and post-test. The outcome of the experiment has tested the hypothesis and shows that the methods presented in the thesis are effective though they have some limitations.