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

In the present high school English reading teaching, teachers are always focusing on explaining and analyzing grammar and language points instead of cultivating students’ ability of grasping the whole text. They ignore cultivating students’ reading strategies and language competence. Schema theory interprets a text from the perspective of schemata and the whole, which is of significant importance to improve students’ reading strategies. At home, schema theory has been applied to college English teaching. Many scholars and experts research in this filed, but most of these researches are limited to theoretical level and university foreign language teaching. In the senior high schools of second-and third-tier cities, students are still lack of schema-based reading training. This research aims to verify that schema theory has a feasible and positive effect on high school English reading teaching.This research unfolded from surveys and contrastively empirical study. 50 grade one students of No.17 Middle High School of Maoming form Guangdong province were selected as the subjects. The empirical research lasted for a month. And there are four research questions, namely whether the schema-based English reading teaching: 1) can improve students’ reading comprehension ability; 2) can arouse students’ interest in reading; 3) can help students master necessary reading strategies;4) can help students form good reading habits. The author used SPSS16.0 to analyze the data collected form surveys and empirical research.Research results show that schema reading theory can help improve students’ reading comprehension ability, help arouse students’ reading interest, help students master some necessary reading strategies and develop good reading habits. Therefore,English teachers should take advantages of the good side of traditional English reading teaching methods and at the same time apply schema theory to reading teaching to help students improve their reading comprehension ability and skills.