An Experimental Study Of The Effect Of Schema Knowledge On Senior Middle School Students’ Reading Comprehension Of Expository Texts

Reading is one of the four basic language skills, which is given great emphasis inhigh school English teaching. With the implementation of The New EnglishCurriculum Standard for Middle School (2003), senior middle school students arerequired to reach a higher level in reading. In the English test papers for senior middleschool students, reading comprehension usually constitutes the largest component ofthe paper and is often allocated the biggest proportion of scores, and the level ofdifficulty is increasing year by year. Both students and teachers spend a large amountof time and energy in reading comprehension, but in reality reading is still a bigheadache for most students and their reading ability has not been improved efficiently.Expository text is one of the most common styles in the reading materials for seniorstudents. It is considered more difficult to comprehend because of the variety ofstructures and unfamiliar content.It is important to apply proper theory to reading comprehension instruction inorder to help high school students improve their reading ability. Schema theory isapplied to explain the reading comprehension psychologically process. The nature ofreading is to build schemata including linguistic schema, content schema and formalschema. There are five different structures for English expository text, sequence,description, problem-solution, compare and contrast and cause and effect, which offera practical guide for expository text teaching.Based on schema theory and reading cognitive process theory, the reading abilityof students hope to be improved by building expository text common schemata andenhancing the schemata knowledge to students. This thesis mainly studies twoquestions;1. Whether are the senior students sensitive to text structure, especially theexpository text structure?2. If so, will the reading ability be improved by enforcingschemata knowledge of expository?This study is developed by an experiment of changing the teaching methods toimprove students’ reading comprehension without increasing the teaching hours. And it is tested that the senior students’ reading comprehension is affected by the way ofschemata knowledge instruction. This study was implemented in two classes with nodifferences in reading abilities from a senior middle school in Guangzhou. TheExperimental Group is instructed based on schema theory, while the Control Group isinstructed in the traditional way.The results of the data indicated that students in the Experimental Group areaffected by the new instruction based on schema theory and their ability to readexpository texts improved more rapidly than the Control Group.This study is an exploration to find a way to teach English expository texts moreefficiently. According to the result, schema theory makes great influence on readingcomprehension instruction and it is workable. Applying this kind instruction has agreat significance to the teaching of reading and therefore deserves furtherobservation.