Interaction Effects Between Topic Familiarity And Language Proficiency On English Reading Comprehension On Different Passage Conditions

Widely used in teaching, scientific researching and outside communicating, English is becoming increasingly important with each passing day. As a result, we have been attaching much importance to the quality of our English teaching. Reading is an important tool in acquiring information and learning; in addition, it is a primary goal of English teaching. During my 4 years’teaching, I find it difficult for the high school students to read English articles. They have done a mountain of reading exercises with an unsatisfying outcome. To improve their English level, the students must beat the English reading. Therefore, it is high time that the English teachers should think of ways to help students make progress in English reading. Schema theory is an important concept in EFL reading, which describes the process in which readers combine their own schematic knowledge with the information in a text to comprehend that text. Most of the domestic researches are theoretical discussion. Only a few researchers have done empirical researching. These researches studied the effect of schematic knowledge on reading performance, in ignorance of the various effects of schematic knowledge on reading comprehension according to the second language proficiency level in different passages. Since topic familiarity is an important indicator of schematic knowledge, this thesis reports on an experiment study carried out in a high school to explore the interaction effects of topic familiarity and language proficiency on EFL reading comprehension in passages of different difficulty.106 fresh students from Jiyuan No.1 Middle School participated in this experiment. They are tested with four passages of four different topics based on passages of college entrance examination. The results reveal that topic familiarity, language proficiency and passage difficulty all have significant effects on reading performance, and there are interaction effects of the three factors. In addition, under different passage difficulties, the effect of topic familiarity on reading comprehension varies according to the level of second language proficiency of the reader. Students of low language level can comprehend the reading material with the help of schematic knowledge if the reading material is easy. But when the language of the passage is difficult, they can not understand the text even if the know the topic of the passage. Students of medium language level can understand passages of different difficulties using language knowledge and schematic knowledge. Students of high language level can decode letters and words with their excellent decoding skills rapidly in a bottom-up fashion, and therefore they do not normally need to resort to schematic knowledge. When they read quite difficult passage, they would utilize the schematic knowledge to aid comprehension.According to the conclusion, this paper suggests teachers carefully choose reading materials to make the topic and the passage difficulty match the students. What is more, teachers are supposed to help the students master the basic language points and accumulate the schematic knowledge. Also, teachers should adopt different methods to teach the students of different levels of second language proficiency.