Toward A Schema-based Systemic Approach To Senior High School EFL Reading Teaching

In senior high school EFL teaching, the teaching of reading has occupied a prominentposition, but it has been suffering from being inefficient due to the lack of systematictheoretical basis and partiality in teaching methods. Meanwhile, the study of readinginstruction based on schema theory has made much progress in the field of EFL teachingresearch, but it is handicapped by its negligence of the senior high school and its often partialmethodology. It is therefore necessary for the present study to explore, on the basis ofprevious studies, and through an integrated methodology combining theoretical and empiricalprocedures, a schema-based systemic approach to senior high school EFL reading teaching.Based on dialectical systemic thinking and schema theory, integrating existing theoriesand methods of reading teaching, and through the methods of theoretical deduction andinduction, this study first explores the theories and methods of senior high school EFL readinginstruction and proposes a schema-based systemic approach to senior high school EFLreading teaching. This approach comprises four principles: that of integrating students’subjectivity and teachers’ leadership, that of emphasizing basic schema building, that ofincorporating schema-based training with other activities, and that of ordered proceduralteaching and learning. The approach also comprises four procedures: semantic and formalschemata activation, systemic synthesis and linguistic schemata enrichment, text analysis andcomprehension, extended reading-writing and schemata reinforcement.Through an empirical methodology mainly consisting of an experiment, this study thenverifies the effects of the schema-based systemic approach to high school EFL readingteaching on increasing the efficiency of instruction and enhancing the proficiency of thelearners’ EFL reading. The experiment comprises a pretest and pre-survey, a one-semesterlong period of strategy implementation, and a posttest and post-survey, taking as its subjectsof study80students of grade one from a certain senior high school in China, and employingEFL proficiency tests, self-confidence questionnaires and interviews as tools of datacollecting. Results generated from the analysis of data reveal that the schema-based systemicapproach to senior high school EFL reading teaching has helped to enhance the students’proficiency in EFL reading and thereby increases the efficiency of EFL reading instruction. This study is pedagogically important in that its findings are directly pertinent to seniorhigh school EFL teaching and capable of enhancing students’ EFL reading proficiency andincreasing the efficiency of instruction. It is also theoretically valuable as it may compensatefor some of the limitations in schema-based EFL teaching research such as their negligence ofthe senior high school and its lack of integrated methodologies.