A Research On The Application Of Schema Theory In Junior High School English Reading Teaching

Currently, English plays a more and more important role in international communication. Reading is one of the most important ways to acquire information and knowledge. However, after the investigation on reading instruction in junior high schools in Hefei Economic and Technological Development Zone, the author finds that English teachers in these schools only focus on grammar and other language points but pay little attention to cultivating the students’ reading ability and strategies in the process of reading teaching, which leads to the low reading efficiency. Therefore, students’ reading ability and strategies need to be improved urgently.After doing a research on the relevant literature, the author finds that schema theory,to some extent, can exert an influence on English reading. A schema is a kind of knowledge structure which refers to the prior knowledge stored in brain, playing an important role in reading comprehension. The process of reading comprehension is an interaction between the reader’s prior knowledge and the text. In order to understand a text, the reader should attach the previous background information to the text. Thus, it is assumed that building the new schemata and activating the existing ones can be conducive to the improvement of junior English reading efficiency.This thesis aims to apply the schema theory into practice in the schools mentioned above. By doing this empirical research, the author hopes to find out how to improve effectively the students’ reading efficiency and English teachers’ reading teaching strategies with the guidance of the schema theory. The teaching experiment involves 8 classes of grade 8 randomly selected from 4 different junior high schools, of which 4 classes are labeled as the experiment classes under the instruction of schema theory and 4 as the control classes under the instruction of traditional teaching pedagogy. To make the research more credible, questionnaires, interviews, pre-tests and post-tests are used as instruments. The data are analyzed by using the statistical software SPSS 17.0.The result of the experiment witnesses the distinct improvement in the experiment classes, which demonstrates that the students’ reading ability and teachers’ reading teaching strategies have been effectively enhanced by applying schema-based teaching method. The author hopes that this research can not only lead to the improvement of English reading teaching and learning in the above-mentioned schools, but also shed light on the improvement of English reading teaching for junior high schools in other areas.