An Experimental Study On The Application Of Schema Theory To The Extensive Reading Teaching For English Majors

As we all know, reading is regarded as one of the most significant skills in language learning and teaching. It’s highlighted in syllabuses not only for English majors but also for all college students studying different majors. It’s believed that students couldn’t do anything without the ability of reading comprehension. Even though language teachers always emphasize its importance a lot, the complexity of reading comprehension is beyond the imagination. The gap between students’ commitment on reading and the knowledge they get from reading exists all the time. Lots of teachers and scholars are trying hard to solve this problem with the help of schema theory. They try to prove that students can get satisfying reading comprehension if they have exact schemata in their mind and they can activate proper schema related to the material.This paper adopts the theoretical and experimental method to emphasize the practical application of the theory. The pre-test and post-test papers and questionnaires are used to collect data to prove the efficiency of the schema theory in quantitative way. The interviews which appear to be qualitative are carried out to investigate the effect of using schema theory in the teaching of English reading. The author chooses one experimental class with 35 students and the other control class with 35 students to do the experiment. The students are all sophomores from School of Foreign Languages in S... The experiment lasts for sixteen weeks.This thesis intends to explore how the reading teacher adopts effective teaching methods to improve the students’ ability of reading comprehension in class by activating the existing prior background knowledge with the textbook information and establishing the new schema after reading. The further expectation should be that the students possess the awareness of applying schema theory and they can adopt it willingly to deal with different kinds of reading materials.The author analyzes the results of the experiment, the questionnaire and the interviews and verifies that the schema-oriented teaching is effective and it can improve the students’ reading comprehension ability. At the same time, the author also points out the limitations in the study and the possibilities for further study. Much more importance should be attached on the future English reading teaching for teachers.