An Action Research On English Reading Discourses Teaching In Senior High School Based On Schema Theory

As one of the five skills of English learning,reading plays a crucial role in the senior high school English learning stage.The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017 edition,revised in 2020)states that students should learn language and humanities knowledge and improve thinking,aesthetics,appreciation and evaluation skills by reading.However,many current senior high school students still have serious problems in reading comprehension.Students are weak in relevant language knowledge,comprehension of discourse and ability to reason about discourse.The lack of schematic knowledge is one of the important reasons for the above problems.The core of schema theory is to activate learners’ existing knowledge and cultivate their consciousness of applying existing schema(content,formal and linguistic schema)to English reading,which can help to develop reading and thinking ability.This study applies schema theory to English reading teaching in senior high school.It uses an action research paradigm to explore the following questions: What is the effect of English reading instruction based on schema theory on students’ understanding of the meaning of discourse? What is the impact of English reading instruction based on schema theory on improving students’ discourse inferential ability?The research uses questionnaires,interviews,and tests to conduct an action research with students in Grade One of a Xinyang senior high School in Henan Province.Before the study,the first investigation is conducted to get to know the current reading level.The action research plan is then designed based on the results of the questionnaire and the first interview,which focus on applying the three kinds of schema of linguistic,formal and content schema to English reading teaching.Two stages are conducted in this research.In the first stage of action research,the three kinds of schema are applied to the specific teaching sessions and the students’ performance in the classroom is accorded.After the experiment,students conduct a second test with the same difficulty and the second interview.The results are recorded to detect the deficiencies in the first stage of action research and then the second stage of action research is designed.In the second stage of action research,three kinds of schema theory are also applied to reading teaching.After the two rounds of research,it is found that the application of schema theory to senior high school English reading teaching can effectively help students improve their reasoning ability and the comprehension of the discourse.Applying the three types of content schema,formal schema,and linguistic schema to the pre-reading,while-reading,and post-reading stages of reading teaching can improve the efficiency of reading teaching.The use of linguistic schema enriches students’ language knowledge,such as vocabulary and grammar.The study of content schema helps students accumulate a lot of cultural background knowledge.The explanation of formal schema knowledge helps students to master the genre and structure of the article systematically.As a result,the ability of discourse reasoning has been dramatically improved,mainly reflected in detailed comprehension questions and word guessing questions.Therefore,applying schema theory to English reading teaching in senior high school not only enriches the teaching mode,but also effectively helps students improve their English reading and reasoning ability.