Teaching Of English Newspaper Reading In Senior High School Based On Schema Theory

While teaching English, teachers and educators find that cultivating senior high school students’ reading ability cannot just depend on adopting conventional textbooks in that they cannot meet students’ requirements. Moreover, the requirements set by the New National English Curriculum Criteria (2003) cannot be met. Meanwhile, only using conventional textbooks cannot make students equipped for College Entrance Examination. Driven by the awareness of supplying additional reading materials, plenty of schools have opened English newspaper reading teaching as a supplement of extensive reading and intensive reading. However, conventional teaching models like grammatical-translation method which emphasizes single bottom-up informative reading are adopted by the majority of teachers. Teachers adopting them tend to focus too much on language points learning but neglect language functions. These teaching models even makes students lack practice about reading abilities. For students, how to grasp the main idea of the text quickly and infer or judge the textual content have become a big problem. Worse still, students cannot comprehend authors’ writing intention. Actually, according to questionnaires for teachers and students in my school, I have found some existing problems puzzling students and teachers, realizing students’ English newspaper reading situations, their interest and expectations. Moreover, Teens has an important place in English Newspaper Reading Teaching in senior high schools in China due to its unique advantages. In view of this, the present authoress chooses this newspaper as a case study.Although schema theory has already been applied in foreign language teaching on account of the fact that its content becomes increasingly rich day by day, the application of schema theory to foreign language teaching mainly focuses on cultivating students’ listening and reading ability, and there are few researches specifically focusing on the application of schema theory to English newspaper reading teaching. The thesis attempts to analyze the main problems existing in English newspaper reading of senior high school students from the angle of schema theory. It has been found that students lack relevant English newspaper linguistic schema and content schema and do not pay attention to the consolidation and accumulation of relevant English newspaper formal schema. To deal with these problems, I attempt to use schema theory as a guidance to help students perfect linguistic schema on English newspaper and mastering the most lately English newspaper vocabulary and grammar rules, assist students to accumulate content schema on English newspapers and understand exotic cultural background information containing special meanings and aid students in activating formal schema by using authentic reading materials and distinguishing different types of literature from one another. Eventually, it is hoped that students’ language proficiency will be upgraded, their good reading habits will be developed and their interest in reading English newspapers will be increased.The quantitative and qualitative research approaches are adopted in this thesis. Two classes of the same level in the present researcher’s school have taken part in the four-month experiment. English newspaper reading teaching in the experimental class is carried out under the guidance of schema theory, meanwhile, traditional teaching methods and models are still unchanged in the controlled class. The data collected from the experiment are analyzed by SPSS 16.0, thus proving that students’ reading proficiency in the experimental class has been significantly improved in contrast to that of the controlled class. This is beyond question that the application of schema theory to English newspaper reading teaching proves to be practical and effective. According to the summary of the interview and data analyses, some implications for English newspaper reading teaching are concluded by the authoress. For instance, teachers should activate students’ prior schema in their mind via pre-reading activities and help them build new schema to perfect their schema system. Teachers should help students analyze and summarize different styles of literature to activate and consolidate their formal schema. Moreover, the teacher should also reflect on how to efficiently organize a class adapting to students with various learning styles. Meanwhile, students’ cooperative learning spirit should be promoted and they should develop good reading habits so as to contribute to the perfection and establishment of their relative schemas of the second language.