The Application Of The Schema Theory To Higher Vocational College English Reading Teaching

Reading is an important activity in people’s daily life. All the time, to improve the students’reading ability and level is one of higher vocational English teaching aims. This paper sets higher vocational students as the research object, and from the point of view of the proposed scheme analyzes the application of schema theory in higher vocational college English reading teaching.Schema is the way that inputs and stores general understanding, and also the commonsense concept in people’s mind. According to Cook (1989) point of view, schema is the "exited knowledge" or "background knowledge" in mind, so schema theory is "relevant background knowledge in language understanding of the role of theory"(Carrell&Eisterhold1988:73). The theory is that, in the text comprehension process, besides the text input information output, the readers must also use their schema knowledge, and with the text information interaction, resonating, in order to achieve the purpose of understanding. Therefore, the process of reading comprehension is that the reader to keep knowledge and text content interaction process. This kind of interaction consists of two at the same time effective activation process guidance, respectively is a "top-down" and "bottom-up" process."Top-down" refers to the reader according to their own knowledge and experience when read materials to make prediction and hypothesis;"Bottom-up" refers to the readers, the article decoding, constructing the text meaning, and then modified existing schema knowledge. When the two process consistent information obtained, the understanding is achieved. By this token, to realize the reading comprehension, the reader must keep exited knowledge, namely schema. Schema is mainly divided into three categories language schema, form schema and content schema, different kinds of schema in the process of reading comprehension plays a different role. In China, to general universities, higher vocational and technical education relative college is a fresh thing; the people have not deeply research the English reading teaching. This paper sets schema theory as a basis for the use of reading comprehension tests to higher vocational freshman students as the subjects, trying to study the language Schema, content Schema and form Schema in the different effect of higher vocational reading comprehension. Experimental results prove that the schema knowledge in reading comprehension usually plays positive role, and language Schema has the basic function.The paper discusses how to use the schema theory in reading teaching of higher vocational college, and hopefully it can have a positive significance for teaching.