A Study On Teaching Strategies Of English Reading In Senior High School Based On The Schema Theory

Reading plays a significant role both in English learning and teaching. In the lastfew years, the college entrance examination has been focusing on students’ cultureof English-speaking countries and innovative thinking ability. However, for a long time,students’ reading comprehension skill is quite limited by the traditional way ofteaching. Teachers are devoted to teaching single words, phrases or grammaticalpoints on a sentence-to-sentence basis, which leads to students’ lacking schemaknowledge and inefficient reading comprehension. How the teachers can helpstudents become efficient readers has become an urgent problem to solve. In recentyears, great attention has been drawn to schema theory in English reading teachingboth at home and abroad. On the basis of schema theory, the thesis aims at studyinghow to help students enrich linguistic schemata, activate content schemata andperfect rhetorical schemata in teaching reading in Oxford English (Jiangsu Edition), sothat students’ reading ability can be improved.The whole thesis falls into five chapters. Chapter one puts more emphasis onthe importance of improving students’ reading ability. It investigates the currentsituation of teaching and learning English reading in No.6high school and analyzesthe problems existing in reading class, therefore sets forth the significance of thethesis.Chapter two presents the literature review. First, it is dedicated to analyzing thenature of reading process, and the three well-known reading models—bottom-up,top-down and interactive models are examined. Secondly, it introduces schema andschema theory. It traces the origin and historical development, and also presentsthree different types of schemata (linguistic schemata, content schemata and formalschemata) and the different roles in reading comprehension. Finally, it presents theclose relationship between schema theory and reading comprehension.Chapter three is concerned with how to carry out the schema-oriented readingstrategies in English reading teaching. To confirm the fact that schemata play a veryimportant role in English reading, the author makes the strategy-based instruction and reading strategies training on the basis of schema theory, illustrating withexamples how to activate their relevant background knowledge and make use ofthem to predict and infer the incoming information. The author is trying to provethat schema-oriented reading strategies can contribute to students improving theirreading ability.Chapter four describes the current experiment in detail. In the experiment,schema-oriented reading strategy was utilized in the experimental class whiletraditional lecturing method was adopted in the control class and finally the resultsof the experiment were compared and analyzed. Then an informal interview is givento some students of experimental class as a complementary way to check theirreading strategy use in reading. Both the result of the post-test and the informalinterview show that the students of experimental class have made progress inreading by learning the schema-oriented reading strategies, and thus prove thatschema-oriented reading strategies can help improve students’ readingcomprehension.Chapter five, the last chapter, brings this thesis to a conclusion. The majorfindings of the study are summarized, the implications for teaching are indicated andlimitations are pointed out.