An Empirical Study On English Reading Teaching In Junior High School Based On Schema Theory

Students should have five basic skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating based on The New English Curriculum Stand for Junior High Schools. Reading has occupied a prominent position among the five skills. However, many problems exist in English reading teaching and learning in Junior high schools. English reading class turns into the grammar class or the vocabulary class by using Grammar-translation method.Students can not generate learning motivation for reading and lake of reading comprehension abilities. In order to solve these problems, a new teaching method based on schema theory is applied in this study which aims to enhance the students’ English reading learning motivation and to improve the students’ abilities of English reading comprehension.The theoretical foundation of this thesis is schema theory. “Schema” refers to the background knowledge stored in human brains. Schema consists of preexisting knowledge and experience. Schema theory is an explanation of how readers use preexisting knowledge and experience to comprehend the reading materials.The research questions of this thesis:1. Can the schema theory help students to enhance their English reading learningmotivation?2. Can the schema theory improve the students’ English reading scores?3. Are there any differences about the improvement of the scores between the high-scoregroup students and the low-score group students in the experimental class?The participants of this research are from the parallel classes of Grade two of the Qianan No.1 Junior High School. Each class has 50 students. Class one is chosen as the control class and class two as the experimental class. In the control class the Grammar-translation method is applied. In the experimental class schema theory is adopted during the teaching. Questionnaires, tests and interview are used as research instruments.After analyzing the results of the questionnaires and interview, it can be seen that the new teaching method based on schema theory can help students to enhance their English reading learning motivation. After analyzing the results of tests, the new teaching method based on schema theory can improve the students’ English reading scores and there are little differences about the improvement of the scores between the high-score group students and the low- score group students in the experimental class. Finally some limitations and suggestions of this research are proposed for further research.