A Study On English Reading Teaching In Middle School From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

Reading possesses an important position in English teaching. It is the importantway for the students to obtain foreign language knowledge and skills. It’s urgent tosolve the problem of how to improve the students’ English reading ability in readingteaching, because reading ability even influences the development of other skills likelistening, speaking and writing. According to some surveys, the present real situationof teaching reading that teachers usually focus on the level of vocabulary and sentenceand in the end class is still teacher-focused and teachers and students have spent muchtime and efforts on reading, but the real effect is not optimistic.This thesis intends to study on English reading in middle school from theperspective of schema theory based on the requirements of students’ reading ability inthe National English Curriculum Standards and the previous researches. In this thesis,the development and the types of the schema theory, and the pervious researches athome and abroad are introduced. Schema can divided into linguistic schema, contentschema and formal schema. These three schemata supplement each other in theprocess of improving students’ reading ability. Schema theory was introduced intoreading by Rumelhart and Carrell, and then it was introduced into China. In thisprocess, a lot of researches on the application of schema theory in foreign languageteaching appeared. On the basis of the theoretical study, the author of this thesisadministered an empirical study to explore the feasibility of applying schema theoryto the teaching practice in middle school and to testify the effect of schema onimproving students’ reading ability.The experimental study attempts to answer the following research questionsthrough quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data which was collected fromquestionnaire, pre-test and post-test.Q1: Can the schema-based teaching method facilitate students’ readingcomprehension abilities efficiently?Q2: Can students acquire necessary reading skills and strategies under theinfluence of the schema-based teaching method?The teaching experiment selected60students from two classes in grade two ofGuangzhou Foreign Language School. The experiment lasted for three months. The teaching pattern of this school is streaming teaching, so the number of the students ineach class is small. Each class has30students. These two classes are chosen fromstream B. The students’ reading ability and proficiency in stream B are poorer thanthat in Stream A, especially in reading ability. One class is chosen as the experimentalclass which uses the teaching method based on schema theory and the other as thecontrol class which use the traditional teaching method as usual.This study has expected teaching results. There exists significant differencebetween the experimental class and control class after applying different teachingreading methods from the analysis of the experiment results. The findings indicatethat schema theory teaching method can effectively applied in reading teaching, canimprove the students’ reading ability effectively.This thesis significantly explores a tentative teaching reading method by theapplication of schema theory. Although the study has some limitations such as thetime span and research design, some suggestions and implications are provided forreading teaching and learning.