Role Of Metaphor Theory From The Perspective Of Schema In Reading

Reading plays a very important role in the process of learning English. Therefore, an increasing number of linguistic scholars both in China and abroad pay attention to improving the students’abilities of reading. However, under the influence of traditional pedagogy, quite a few teachers always focus on learning of the knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, and they ignore learning, accumulating and applying of the schema knowledge and metaphor knowledge, which are closely related to reading materials. The present paper mainly explores the role of metaphor theory from the perspective of schema in reading.In this paper, the author first made a brief introduction of schema theory, metaphor and metaphor theory from the perspective of schema. Then the quantitative research and qualitative research were both adopted. The author chose120students of two classes from Northeast Forestry University as the experimental class and the control class. The traditional pedagogy was adopted in the control class and the schema metaphor oriented instruction model was adopted in the experimental class. The result of the pre-test showed that the two classes were almost at the same level in English reading comprehension at the beginning of the experimental study. And after sixteen weeks’training, the author held the post-test in order to test the effectiveness of the training. The collected data were analyzed to get the average value, standard deviations, t-tests and so on and so forth by SPSS.The score of the experimental class was significantly higher than the control class after adopting the schema metaphor oriented instruction model in reading. The results showed that1) the metaphor theory from the perspective of schema can provoke reading interesting of the students;2) the metaphor theory from the perspective of schema can reduce the understanding gap between the author and readers through cross-domain mapping;3) the metaphor theory from the perspective of schema can improve the students’discourse comprehension.Therefore, we conclude that the usage of the schema metaphor oriented teaching in reading can increase the students’ reading interests, broaden the students’ vision, and develop their English ability in an all-round way.