A Study On English Reading Teaching Approach Based On Schema Theory In Junior High School ESL Class

Reading is an intricate and active psychological process of interacting knowledge existing in brains with the decoded symbols from articles for the purpose of constructing meaning. While schema theory holds that language itself contains no meaning, and the meaning is generated and constructed by readers through combining and interacting the new information with the existed knowledge and experience. Many efforts have been devoted to the researches on the schema theory, especially in the last century, many experts and scholars made their endeavors to employ the schema theory to ESL reading teaching with a result showing that using schematic knowledge properly is conducive to make reading understanding more effective and efficient.The traditional teacher-centered reading teaching model of concentrating on lexicon-grammatical instruction is still prevailing in domestic junior school ESL teaching,with the background information insufficiently concerned in reading teaching practice. And primarily domestic studies on the schema theory are still confined to higher education at the theoretical level, with few empirical researches on the schema theory applied in junior middle school ESL reading teaching classes.This research is designed to inquire into whether the reading teaching method based on schema theory can effectively improve middle school students’ reading comprehension achievements, develop their reading habit, make them more interested in reading, and equip them with facilitated reading strategies. Therefore, the author conducts an experiment in the experimental class(EC) and control class(CC), and applies the traditional reading teaching methods of emphasizing literal explanation in the CC, while the reading teaching methods directed by schema theory are put into use in the EC. Two questionnaires and two tests are utilized respectively before and after this research, and SPSS is used to process the results of tests. And the result shows that after the experiment, compared with the CC, the students from the EC improve their scores significantly; they become fonder of reading; and their reading skills are also developed.Therefore, the author concludes that the reading teaching method based on schema theory contributes to improve junior school students’ reading comprehension results, increase their interests in reading and prompt them to apply more reasonable tactics to activate and construct schemata, and ultimately brush up the comprehensive English proficiency.