An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Summary Writing On Senior High Students' Reading Comprehension Based On Schema Theory

As a typical form of reading-writing integration,summary writing has raised wide concern among teachers and students on account of its popular application in large-scale tests at home and abroad.Considering the activation of relevant schema involved in the process of reading and writing,it is feasible or even efficient to apply schema theory to the summary writing instruction.Therefore,this study aims at investigating the effects of schema-theory-based summary writing on senior high students' reading comprehension.The research,covering the whole semester of 18 weeks,involved two parallel classes with a total of 96 students in senior two.The experimental class received the schema-theory-based summary writing instruction while the control class adopted the normal reading instruction.In order to examine the effects of schema-theory-based summary writing instruction on senior high students' reading comprehension,the pre-test,mid-test and post-test were conducted on both classes and an interview was performed on 15 participants from three different proficiency groups of the experimental class.After the data collection and analysis,the research findings are as follows.Firstly,the schema-theory-based summary writing instruction has a considerably positive effect on senior high students' reading comprehension;secondly,it significantly improves their reading performance in micro-level questions,but not in macro-level questions;thirdly,performers of different proficiencies improve to different degrees,with medium performers making the greatest progress and low performers the least.Besides,the interview responses reveal that participants at different proficiency levels show differences in the process and the focus of,and the attitude towards,summary writing.This study offers some insights into EFL teaching.To improve senior high students' reading comprehension,EFL teachers can adopt the schema-theory-based summary writing instruction to integrate reading and writing with the factors of question type and students' proficiency taken into consideration.