The Application Of Schema Theory To The Teaching Of English Reading In Rural Senior High School

Reading is a kind of complex intelligent process by which we gain information through the written form and reading is also a psychological process that obtains the sense of words and the meaning of reading materials through written form. Obviously, reading is valuable and very important to all students when they learn a language. As Carrell pointed out,"for many students, reading is by far the most important of the four skills in a second language, particularly in English as second or foreign language". According to English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School, goals of English reading teaching in senior high schools is to cultivate the students’reading strategies, develop students’ sense of English and give extraordinary importance and attention to the cultivation of acquiring information and dealing with information during the process of reading.The requirement for reading ability increases with the University Entrance Examination and the position of reading comprehension is more outstanding and it is going up in tendency. Therefore, how to develop the students’reading ability has definitely become a major problem in reading comprehension in senior high schools. But in real situation, many senior high school students show little or no improvement in reading. What’s worse, the students in rural areas are getting tired of learning English. What has caused this phenomenon? The traditional teaching method and the students’ awareness are two important factors.Schema theory, which derived from the field of psychology, is the study of psychological organization for storing and retrieving readers’ existing knowledge while acquiring or dealing with the new information. As an influential theory on reading teaching, schema theory has been applied in EFL learning, giving senior high school teachers a lot of enlightenment in English reading teaching. According to schema theory, readers have great obstacles in reading due to the lack of relevant schema and non-activation of relevant schema.Williams came up with an interesting three-step approach to reading, which is based on schema theory. According to the Three-Step English Reading Teaching Approach, pre-reading activities can be applied to activate the students’ prior schemata; while-reading activities can be conducted to build up new schemata in the students’ mind and post-reading activities can be used to consolidate the students’ newly-built schemata. This thesis is to explore:1. Can the Three-Step English Reading Teaching Approach based on schema theory be applied to the English reading teaching in rural senior high school?2. Can reading teaching under the guidance of schema theory improve rural senior students’ reading ability?In order to carry out the study and prove its feasibility, the writer conducted an experiment in class3and class4in senior grade two, Daxie Middle School in Ningbo. Class3was the experiment group (EG) and the Three-Step English Reading Teaching Approach based on schema theory was applied to the reading teaching. Class4was the control group (CG) and the traditional teaching method was employed in reading class. The experiment period is from February to June in2011. As for the instruments of the experiment, the writer designed two questionnaires showing the changes in students’ reading preferences and reading strategies; one test is for the influence of content familiarity and context provision; the other, for the students’ reading proficiency and6interviews show the students’comments after applying the new teaching.From the data analysis, the writer confirmed that the Three-Step English Reading Teaching Approach based on schema theory can be applied to reading teaching in rural senior high school. Teachers can help the students activate their prior schemata before reading, build up new schemata in the students’ mind while reading and consolidate the students’ newly-built schemata after reading. In addition, the writer confirmed that reading teaching under the guidance of schema theory indeed can improve rural senior students’ reading ability.Here is what the writer should stress in future reading teaching:language learning should be stressed on to enrich students’ language schemata; extensive reading should be encouraged to enrich students’ content schemata; text genre and discourse structure analyzing should be emphasized to perfect students’ formal schemata; various reading strategies should be encouraged in reading class; the students’ interest in reading should be aroused and the reading speed of the students should be improved.This thesis is made up of six chapters. Chapter one is mainly about the significance, background and purpose of the study as well as the overall of the thesis. Chapter two is literature review, which introduces what schema theory is and what reading is in detail as well as previous researches on schema theory in reading and reading teaching. Chapter three introduces the Three-Step English Reading Teaching Approach based on schema theory. Chapter four presents an experimental study on the effectiveness of applying schema theory to reading teaching. Chapter five reveals data collection and data analysis. Chapter six presents major findings of the experiment, existing problems in reading comprehension, implications for future study and limitations of the study.