The Application Of Schema Theory To English Reading Teaching In Junior High Schools

Reading is a very important skill for foreign language learners,and for many people,it is the most important skill to master.In China,reading teaching is considered to be the most important task in senior high school teaching.In many schools,the current reading teaching adopts the translation teaching method.This method has some disadvantages,which restricts the ability of students to read to some extent.At present,reading teaching based on schema theory is one of the popular reading teaching methods.Schema theory holds that verbal or written language does not make sense in itself.It is only used to guide listeners or readers to activate preexisting background knowledge in the mind.This should be well understood in reading and teaching.It is particularly important.In order to prove whether reading teaching based on schema theory can improve students' reading ability and stimulate their reading interest,the author started a teaching experiment for eight months from June 2017 to January 2018 in Jiaozhou No.6 middle school.The two classes were selected as experimental classes and control classes.In the experimental class,there were schema-oriented reading instruction in the test class and translation-based reading instruction in the control class.In the paper,data were collected by a pre-test,post-test,questionnaire and interview.The statistical results of the experiment indicate that students in EC have outperformed students in CC in reading after eight month's training.The results of the interview survey for students demonstrate that students have become more interested in English reading than before.They learned to establish reading goals and make reading plans.Many students actively read English articles after class to enhance their reading comprehension.This is something they rarely do before the experiment.Therefore,we can conclude that the application of schema theory in English reading teaching can effectively stimulate students' interest in reading and improve their English reading ability.