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

In response to the poor performance of Chinese senior high school students in reading as well as the problems in teaching reading the teachers have encountered,—many students who have quite a large vocabulary, are excellent at grammar and have obtained various reading skills, are still not good at reading, the author tries to find a solution to improving the students’ reading ability using culture schema theory.Cultural schema theory refers to reader’s cultural background knowledge and it plays a crucial role in cross-cultural sense making. Familiarity or unfamiliarity with particular culture-specific knowledge may facilitate or hinder readers’ understanding of highly culture-specific texts, such as those with weddings, funerals and American folks. So, cultural schema can explain students’ reading comprehension problem. Students’ reading ability will sure be improved as they are constructing more and more cultural schemata.The author attempts to apply cultural schema theory into reading teaching, trying to activate students’ prior cultural schema or help to construct their new cultural schema concerning three phenomena—cultural schema overlaps, cultural schema conflict and cultural schema deficiency. To test the effect of cultural schema theory on reading teaching, two research hypotheses are raised. They are1. If teachers apply cultural schema theory into English reading teaching, the students can perform much better in reading comprehension.2. If teachers apply cultural schema theory into English reading teaching, the students may become more interested in English reading.To test the active effectiveness of cultural schema theory on reading teaching, an experiment was designed and carried out in two senior high classes of Senior Two, which lasted for about two months. In this research paper, both of the quantitative and qualitative methods are used in the process of analysis.The results show that the theory did work in the experiment. There were significant differences between the experimental class and the control class in their reading performance. The students in experimental class made great progress in performing reading tasks while the students in control class achieved less comparatively. Besides, the questionnaire shows that students in experimental class became more and more interested in English reading, while the students in control class did not show any difference in the interest of English reading.