A Study On The Application Of Schemata Theory To English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

In English teaching, the learning of linguistic knowledge is still laid the most emphasis. It is generally considered not beneficial for the acquisition of the learning strategy and competence of students in high school for their English learning, to which greater importance should be attached, especially for the reading comprehension. Meanwhile, from the close observation of students’ reading process, it can be found that students’ understanding of a discourse is mostly based on their previous knowledge of certain words, so that the meaning they infer from the discourse is usually unreasonable and illogical, regardless of the background information of the whole discourse. As a consequence, it multiplies the difficulty in both English learning and teaching. What’s more, the topics involved in high school English are quite varied, on the other hand, the limitation of time and space in an English class can not guarantee students to obtain enough information that is necessary for their English learning. All these contribute to the motivation of the exploration for a suitable reading model in class for students.Both abroad and at home, schema theory has been applied to English teaching with a positive effect. Based on those achievements, a new reading model, "theme-oriented and structure-framed" is tried out in the experiment study, aiming at helping students to develop a proper reading strategy when dealing with a discourse. Thus, their reading comprehension ability can be improved. After the experiment study, whether this reading model is valid and whether the effect is the same to students with different language levels are remain to be known.Reading test, questionnaire and interview are adopted to get an objective result of the experiment. During the experiment study lasting for two terms, the subjects are divided into three groups according to their language level. Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data collected from the questionnaire, pre-test and post-test, as well as the interview after the experiment, the result reveals that the reading model adopted in the experiment is effective to all the students to develop their reading strategy, but in different degree. Students with an advanced language competence do not have a remarkable improvement in their reading ability. Students with intermediate language competence have the greatest improvement among the three, while students with the primary competence can be aware of the reading strategy but consider vocabulary to be the major obstacle in reading comprehension.