The Application Of Schema Theory To English Reading Of Narrative Passage And Expository Passage In Senior High School

English reading has always been the focus of English study, which is an important way for us to acquire information and the basic way to learn foreign culture. For most Chinese students, English reading is the key factor which can influence their English score. According to the English Curriculum Standard for Senior Middle School, English teachers are required to improve students’ ability of acquiring information, dealing with information, analyzing information and solving problems, especially the ability of thinking and expressing in English in order to lay a good foundation for their future study. So how to improve students’ reading ability and how to improve their overall ability of using English are important tasks for every English teacher.As a matter of fact, presently, many English teachers focus most of their attention on grammar points and sentence structures in spite of discourse, even if a few teachers have realized the importance of discourse, they seldom have time to cultivate students’ reading ability and reading strategies, so a lot of students have mastered few reading skills.From the view of schema theory, the author analyzes the current situation and the difficulties of English reading with the purpose of testing whether schema theory has influence on English reading. What is more, the author also tries to find out which kind of reading ability is more greatly improved with the schema-oriented teaching, is it the ability of narrative reading or the ability of expository reading. Based on the results, English teachers can improve their teaching ability. This thesis gives an analysis of the importance of schema theory in English reading. The author suggests that teachers should encourage students to develop their own schema, not only linguistic schema, but also content schema and formal schema.Based on this instruction, the author conducted an experiment. The experiment began from September to December. The author chose two ordinary classes, one was experimental class and the author applied schema theory instruction, the other one was controlled class and the author applied traditional method of which the main focus was on words and translation. After nearly one term’s experiment, the author used pre-test and post-test to find out the results. From the data, the author finds that schema theory really has some active influence on students’ English reading ability, and schema theory has more effectively improved the ability of narrative reading instead of expository reading.So the author suggests that, during students’ senior high school period, English teachers should pay more attention to content schema and formal schema, not only linguistic schema. Teachers should let students come across different types of passages in order to improve their reading ability. From this thesis, teachers should apply schema theory to their reading class.