A Study Of The Application Of The Schema Theory To The English Reading Teaching In Senior High Schools

Reading is an important and difficult point in English teaching and learning, which is always concerned about by most of students, teachers and researchers. However, the traditional method plays a dominant part in reading teaching of senior high school in China, which focuses on the knowledge of the words, phrases and grammar instead of kinds of schemas relevant tightly to the reading materials, which is also known as the background knowledge or the schema in readers’ minds. It not only deviates from the requirements of the new curriculum standard, but also leads to a bad teaching and learning result, and the students’ reading levels haven’t been improved effectively. Looking back my teaching, I am used to using the traditional way all the time, which also leads to the dull atmosphere in class, students’ detesting learning feelings, the bad teaching effect, so it’s hard for me to break through. Therefore, after doing some theoretical research, the paper will concentrate on the differences of reading subject, realize the actual condition and reading level of my students in Yunnan Province, and then explore a new strongly operational and effective teaching model from the schema theory of cognitive domain.For this, the paper firstly makes the theoretical research about the reading and the schema separately. Later, analyze the intimate connection between schema theory and reading process, especially the different usages about three kinds of schemas in the reading process. Also illustrate the study condition about the application of the schema theory to the English reading teaching in China and abroad, and analyze my students’ actual problems in English reading. Then, the author puts forward the English teaching model by the guidance of schema theory. Finally, the author makes use of two classes to go on a teaching experiment, which lasts one whole term.The result of the experiment reveals that the students’ reading achievement in experimental class has been improved greatly than that in control class, which shows the teaching and learning method in schema theory is more effective than the traditional method. Thus, during the English reading teaching, teachers should realize the important guidance of schema theory and apply the schema theory to the whole teaching process. And teachers also should help students to add and enrich necessary background knowledge so as to get good reading effect.