The Application Of Schema Theory In English Reading Teaching In Rural Junior Middle School

Reading is a complicated intelligent activity which makes readers acquire information from written language as well as a psychological process which helps readers obtain meaning from written language. As an extremely crucial component for English teaching and learning at middle school stage, reading is a critical path for students to obtain English knowledge and skills. However, for the majority of the middle school students in rural areas in China, it still remains an obstacle to efficiently improve reading ability. In addition to their weakness in vocabulary and grammar, their background knowledge of western culture, science and geography etc, is far from sufficient. Consequently, they often fail to capture the accurate meaning and information from the reading materials. Teachers can help students understand the target passage in the process of cultural additional using the related knowledge of Schema Theory. Therefore, in order to cope with the problem, this research is carried out to explore ways to how to improve Junior Middle school students’ English reading ability applying Schema Theory.To address to the unsatisfying teaching status of English reading in Junior Middle school, the author first provides an overview of the basic concepts and theories about reading and Schema Theory in particular as well as its application in the teaching of reading. Then with this theoretical rationale combined with empirical teaching practices, the author is intended to explore the following two research questions: 1. Will the schema-based teaching method be able to improve students’ reading comprehension abilities? 2. Will students be able to acquire useful reading skills and strategies by means of schema-based teaching method? Furthermore, with Scheme theory as the theoretical guide, the author strives to explore a suitable class teaching mode which fits English reading teaching at rural middle schools.This research includes 60 students from two classes in grade nine of a Middle School in Tai’an county of Liaoning province with one as experimental class and class two as control class. Schema theory is applied in the English reading teaching in the experimental class, while normal teaching method is adopted in the control class. Two questionnaire surveys, pretest and posttest are carried out. Then the data collected was analyzed by SPSS software.According to the research results, Schema theory is suitable to the English reading teaching at rural middle schools and it has effectively improved students’ English reading ability and inspired their reading interests. In the meanwhile, students have also obtained useful reading skills and strategies. Therefore, it suggests that to improve the students’ reading ability, English teachers should utilize Schema Theory in their teaching to try their best to help students create, enrich, activate and consolidate the cultural schema knowledge in their minds. Particularly, different cultures should be explained to students, so as to help them improve their abilities of reading comprehension.