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

Reading is not only the content but also the tool of study for senior high schoolstudents. It is well known that reading is the most important of five skills of listening,speaking, reading, and writing and translating/interpreting. It is also a significant way forstudents to acquire knowledge and information. The New Curriculum Standard for SeniorHigh English has improved the requirement towards students’ reading ability, including theability of getting and dealing with the main information from general articles;understanding the gist and author’s intention and reasoning the tendency through clues inthe article and so on. To improve reading ability, students are required to have higherlanguage level, develop good reading habits and master skilled reading skills.In traditional English reading teaching in senior high school, teachers translate thetexts word by word and sentence by sentence, which are called Grammar-Translationmethod. However, teachers seldom instruct students to learn background knowledge ordiscourse structure and train their reading skills in class. Due to these defects, students aretoo dependent on teacher’s explanation or dictionary to understand the passage wholly,thoroughly or completely. Taking advantage of related knowledge about Schema Theory,students can understand the target passage in the process of cultural additional. They canspeculate the meaning of words and phrases based on the context, judge the topic of onearticle in view of the background knowledge and analyze the type of the reading text withthe help of genre and structure. In the light of Schema Theory, reading is divided into threestages: pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading. The purpose of pre-reading activitiesis to activate the existing schemata; the while-reading is to establish and enrich newschemata and post-reading is to consolidate and strengthen the built schemata.Based on the basis of expounding the related theories and researches of the SchemaTheory and reading teaching, the thesis is to explore the influence of the application ofSchema Theory to reading teaching in senior high school. The paper focuses on thefollowing questions:Firstly, what are the problems that students are faced with in reading under thetraditional reading teaching method?Secondly, can the application of Schema Theory improve students reading ability?Thirdly, if Schema Theory can improve students’ reading ability, how to apply theSchema Theory to promote students’ English reading ability effectively?The subjects of the study are93students of Grade Two from Weixian No.2middle school in Hebei Province. The author combines the qualitative with quantitative researchmethods to make questionnaires, tests and interview in the two classes. And then softwareSPSS is used to analyze the experimental results in detail.The research results indicate that the senior high school students are faced with atrouble. On one hand, reading plays an important role in English learning, but on the otherhand, students do not have much interest in reading together with the bad reading habitsand inexpert reading strategies. The schema-oriented teaching method can improvestudents’ reading ability and reading interests effectively. To enhance the reading ability,students are supposed to activate the existing schema first, then construct and enrich newschema and finally consolidate and enforce the built schema.