A Study Of English Reading Instruction In Senior Middle Schools On The Basis Of The Schema Theory

Reading is always viewed as the most important one of the four language skills.For a long time, reading instruction has been one of the hottest issues in fundamentaleducation, drawing the deep concern of educational experts and scholars at home andabroad. Once, reading was thought to be a passive skill. Educational experts andscholars have carried out a large amount of research into reading, and they recentlyaccount for reading again from cognitive psychology. Reading is a psychologicalprocess in which we acquire the information from the reading materials. It involveshighly complex cognitive processing operations. According to the new findings,scholars begin to study reading theory based on the schema theory. The schema theoryemphasizes that reading comprehension is an interactive process between schemas thereader already know and the reading material. In the process, readers make use oflinguistic schema, content schema and rhetorical schema to help understand thereading material, improving reading efficiency.Being based on the relevant research of the schema theory, this thesis has studiedthe application of the schema theory to English reading instruction in senior middleschools. The important question of the study is how to combine the schema theory andreading instruction in order to achieve good teaching result. According to the researchof scholars at home and abroad, schema can be divided into linguistic schema, contentschema and rhetorical schema. In this thesis, the author puts forward the concretemethods to build three schemas in reading process. Meanwhile, combining three readingmodels, the author also puts forward the reading teaching model based on the schematheory. In order to verify the effectiveness of this method, the author did a comparativeexperiment in her internship school. In the experimental class, the author used theschema theory to teach reading. However, in the control class, the author usedtraditional teaching method to teach reading. According to the analysis of the data formthe pretest and posttest, the text score of the experimental class is higher than thecontrol class, the results proved that the reading instruction on the basis of schematheory is effective to improve students’ reading competence. According to the study of this thesis, the author finds that of the three schemas, thelinguistic schema is the foundation of understanding the reading material. The Contentschema is the condition for reading comprehension. The Rhetorical schema is the basison which the readers can more easily understand the structure of the reading material.Teachers should help the students to perfect the three schemas and improve readingefficiency.