ESL Reading Teaching Under The Framework Of Schema Theory: An Empirical Research In Senior High School

Reading is very essential to everyone in a literate society. Students with highreading proficiency can facilitate them to gain great progress and chances. In seniorhigh school, reading plays an important role in English reading and teaching, it isstipulated in English Teaching Syllabus that English teachers should lay emphasis onthe development of students’ reading competence because English reading competenceis fundamental for improving other English competence and so teachers spent a lot oftime and energy on English reading learning and teaching. However, the performanceof students in reading is not satisfactory.How to develop the learners’ reading ability and improve the effectiveness ofreading comprehension is the focus in the study of Second Language Acquisition.Those researchers in the study of Second Language Acquisition explain how thereaders comprehend the reading material using schema theory when they studied in theprocess of reading, and they draw a conclusion that schema plays an important role inthe reading of Second Language Acquisition. So applying the reading mode under theframework of schema theory in English reading teaching is beneficial.To meet the need of teaching reform in senior high school, this research was aimedat finding out the effects of applying the reading mode under the framework ofschema theory to help the students improve their reading comprehension. Theexperiment is designed to find out answers to two questions:(1) Compared with the traditional way of reading in ESL teaching, is the reading modeunder schema theory more effective on the students’ reading comprehension?(2) Does the reading mode under the framework of schema produce any effects onstudents’ reading skills and attitudes? If the answer is yes, what effects do they have?The researcher carried out a one-term empirical study in Grade One of GuiyangNo.3Experimental High School. The research applied both the quantitative andqualitative methods. The participants were students from two regular classes in GradeOne. One class was the experiment class, and the other was the control class. In theexperiment class, the teacher applied the reading mode under the framework ofschema theory in stages of pre-reading, in-reading, post-reading. While in the controlclass, traditional reading mode was utilized. Data collection included pre-test andpost-test，questionnaire surveys and a post informal class interview. In order to find out whether there were any differences in scores in pretest and posttest in theexperiment class and the control class, the data collected from pretest and posttestwere processed by Independent Sample T–test with SPSS16.0, and the results of theinterview and questionnaire in the experiment class and the control class before theexperiment and after the experiment were analyzed and compared to find out whetherthere were any positive changes about reading process and methods.The findings of this research are summarized as follows:First, the reading mode under schema theory is more effective on the students’reading comprehension than the traditional way of reading; second, it has improvedthe students’ reading skills and stimulated their reading interest.The implications from this research denote that applying the reading mode underthe framework of schema theory is a worthwhile research on ESL reading teaching insenior high school. In the current curriculum reform, more attention should be paid toresearch on teaching mode and methods guided by ESL teaching theories.