An Application Of Schema Theory And Discourse Analysis To English Reading Teaching In Secondary Vocational School

In secondary vocational school English teaching syllabus, reading is regarded as the main task of English teaching. However, the existing situation of reading teaching in secondary vocatioal school is that the teacher try their best to teach reading material in grammar-translation way, some relative discourse theories have not been used in vocational high school reading teaching. According to some research results, though integrating schema theory and discourse analysis is a comparatively new field, there are still much work to do in our knowledge about it, some reading theories such as schema, discourse, cohesion, etc are of great importance in enhancing the readers’ comprehensive ability and communicative competence. Since the theories have been proved of directive function for all kinds of language activities, so, it should be no exception for secondary vocational school English reading teaching. On the base of the belief, the author sets out to make a study to prove that applying schema theory and discourse analysis theory to reading teaching is of great importance and necessity, At the same time, the author seeks to find ways to combine the two theories in practice, and aims to explore effective ways to improve vocational school students’ reading comprehension ability. The author makes experiments to see whether such theories can improve reading teaching in practice, and how it is superior to traditional way of reading teaching. This experiment was carried out from August,2011to July,2012. The writer did experiments in two classes that she was teaching in No.l Vocational School of Tanggu, Tanggu District, Tianjin. The students were all under the admitting marks of ordinary senior high school, so almost all of them were poor in their subjects, especially English. The two classes used the same textbooks. The two classes shared the same teaching conditions, the same teaching schedule and the same teaching contents except that EC was instructed by the schema-oriented reading aproaches, especially genre analysis method, while the CC was guided by the routine reading instruction.The author adopted several methods to conduct the experiments, such as collecting materials, comparing different teaching modes, contrastive analysis and conclusion. After presenting and analyzing the results and data, the author argued that the adopted theories proved to be fruitful in enhancing students’reading comprehension ability and interest.