A Study On The Application Of Content Schema In The Teaching Of English Reading In Senior High School

Reading is one of the main ways to acquire and process information. For students of English as aforeign language, reading is a basic and important skill. English Curriculum Standards for Senior HighSchools (Experiment)(the Ministry of Education,2003:6) explicitly pointed out that English readingcourse for senior high schools should be based on the cognitive characteristics and learning developmentneeds of senior high school students, focusing on improving students to obtain information, processinformation and the ability to analyze and solve problems. So to improve students’ reading comprehensionability is one of the important tasks in the teaching of senior high school English class. Through classroomobservation and random interaction with students, the author found that in this senior high schoolwidespread problems with students’ reading are their poor knowledge horizon, the lack of relatedbackground knowledge and the poor reading ability. At the same time, the author also interviews andcommunicates with the other English teachers in this school, the author found that90%of the teachers inthis school adopt a similar teaching mode, that is, first is the teaching of the new words, then comes theanalysis and explanation of texts, sentence by sentence. And finally is the practice of the key words,language points and sentence patters. According to the study of Quan Feiyan in her Focusing on contentschema and improving the teaching of English reading, this teaching method leads to most students’ failingto take the initiative to understand the content of the article and their inability to establish and activate theirexisting background knowledge in their reading to help them understand the passage. And this causes thefact that although many of them have spent a lot of time and energy in reading, the reading effect is farfrom satisfactory.This study explores the application of content schema in English reading class in senior high schools.And proves the effectiveness in improving students’ reading comprehension ability. The researchhypothesis of this thesis is: content schema can help improve students’ English reading comprehensionability.The experiment aims to answer the following two questions:1. What are the problems with students’ reading and what caused these problems? 2. Can content schema help improve students’ reading comprehension ability?The study takes the students of Class (6) in Grade One. This class is the class which the author teaches.Besides, the paper also reviews the relations between background knowledge and reading comprehensionability home and abroad and put these theories into teaching practice. The author carefully designs anexperiment and tries to confirm the hypothesis during the four-month term. The study shows that thestudents’ reading comprehension ability and reading speed have obviously improved after a term’sexperiment. Therefore, the author draws a conclusion that content schema plays an important role instudents’ reading speed and comprehension ability, which also proves the feasibility and effectiveness ofthe application of content schema in promoting English reading teaching in senior high school.