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A Study Of Teaching English Reading In Senior Middle School Based On Relevance Theory And Schema Theory

Posted on:2013-05-21Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:H N NiuFull Text:PDF
GTID:2297330362463798Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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As an indispensable part, English teaching occupies an important position at the stage ofhigh school education. For a long time, a number of teachers have no correct cognition aboutEnglish reading teaching due to the impact of traditional English teaching style. Consequently,students pay more attention to linguistic knowledge learning (vocabulary, sentence structureand grammar etc.) Even though they become proficient with vocabulary, who still havedifficulties in understanding a passage as expected. Therefore, how to teach reading becomesa hot issue to be discussed. The author considers that the application of relevance and schematheory in English reading comprehension is able to help students improve their readingcompetence. The reason is, under the guidance of these two theories, teaching has a certainflexibility and creativity, which may stimulate students’ interest and encourage them toparticipate in the classroom activities. Gradually, under this form of pedagogy, students’reading skill may be improved as well. In that case, teacher is a guider, monitor and facilitator,who helps students to develop their comprehension, including language knowledge, cultureconsciousness and reading skills etc.Reading is an active and dynamic psychological process, which combines the textknowledge and background knowledge together. Therefore, the schema theory asserts thatenriching the schemata in readers’ minds can improve their reading ability. Relevance theoryis a theory of language communication, which proposes that language communication is anostensive-inferential process from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. It claims thathuman cognition tends to be the maximization of relevance, while language communicationinclines to the optimal relevance. According to relevance theory, reading is a writtencommunicative activity between writer and reader. Thus, writer’s communicative intentionmust be achieved through inference. The author puts forward teaching will receive goodresults to enrich students’ schema knowledge and practice their inference ability withoutignoring the linguistic knowledge teaching.For that reason, the author conducted a study on English reading based on relevance andschema theory, which proposed the hypothesis that teaching reading under the guidance of thetwo theories may receive better results than traditional teaching style. This study identified thehypothesis through experiment and questionnaire. The author carried out a one semester’sexperiment which involved125students at a middle school in Xingtai of Hebei province. Asthe experimenter, the author selected one class as experimental class (EC) and another ascontrol class (CC) randomly. The two classes were both taught by grammar-translation method before the experiment. During the experiment, the experimental class adopted the newteaching method based on relevance and schema theory, while the control class continuedbeing taught by the traditional method.At last, the data from questionnaire shows more students began to correct their badreading habits and the attitude of English learning. The importance of background knowledgeand reading strategies had been realized by students at the same time. Some of the studentseven began to attempt to use strategies while reading. The experimental data indicates there issignificant improvement on the scores of English reading comprehension in EC comparedwith CC. Therefore, the data proved it was helpful and necessary for the students to improvetheir reading competence through supplementing and enriching their background knowledge,expanding their reading strategies, and cultivating their good reading habits during theprocess of reading teaching. It also demonstrated that teaching reading under the frame workof relevance and schema theory received a better effect than using the traditional style.But this study is only a preliminary discussion, which needs to carry out a deep andthorough research so as to guide the teachers and students well. The author hopes this studywould have a positive influence on teaching reading in English at middle school.This thesis is divided into five parts.The first part is introduction. It includes the purpose of the study and the structure of thepaper.The second part is literature review. It elaborates the author’s conceptual understandingof the research topic and the theoretical underpinning of this study.The third part is methodology. It provides type of research, participants, instruments,procedure, data analysis and the actual application in formal instruction based on relevanceand schema theory.The fourth part is results and discussion. In this part each result reported is followed by aproper discussion which shows the author’s understanding of the research topic underinvestigation.The last part is conclusion, which concludes the findings in this research, suggestions forEnglish reading teaching, the limitations of this research and suggestions for further study.
Keywords/Search Tags:schema theory, relevance theory, reading competence, quasi-experimental study
PDF Full Text Request
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