An Empirical Study On Schema Theory In Senior High School English Reading Teaching

As is known to all, reading is one of the major means for students of senior highschool to obtain information and at the same time, it is an essential part of Englishlearning. Therefore, it is necessary for English teachers to know that effective readingteaching can help students to acquire knowledge, accumulate vocabulary, mastersentence patterns and improve writing capabilities.The English Curriculum for Senior High School points out that the ultimate goalof reading teaching is to cultivate efficient and independent readers, who masterdifferent reading skills. However, in the current English teaching in senior high school,most teachers tend to apply the traditional grammar-translation mode, based ongrammar and syntactic analysis and they often neglect the discourse analysis andcultivation of students’ reading capability.In order to create a more efficient reading class, the author attempts to introduceSchema Theory into the reading teaching for students of senior high school. Twoparallel classes were chosen as the subjects of the experiment (One is for theexperiment and the other is for control and comparison.) in No.6Middle School ofShijiazhuang to organize a four-month empirical study. The experiment class weretrained in reading strategies based on Schema Theory：activating existing schema,relying on the prior knowledge to acquire information; constructing new schema, andimproving reading skills. On the other hand, the students in the control class weretaught with traditional teaching methods. Four months later, the students of the twoclasses took some examinations and the results were collected and analyzed. The dataanalysis shows that compared with the control class, students in the experimentalclass made more progress in EFL reading after the training. It proved that the readingteaching mode based on Schema Theory can help to stimulate students’ readinginterest and nurture their positive feeling towards reading, and as a result, students canimprove their ability of reading and comprehending.The conclusion is that the reading teaching based on Schema Theory canstimulate the students’ reading interest, cultivate the positive feelings towards reading, improve their reading habits, and help them to apply reading strategies to better theirreading comprehension and speed. Therefore, in the opinion of the author, it isfeasible to apply Schema Theory to the English reading teaching for the students ofsenior high school.