Chapter One Introduction
1.1Background of the Study
Reading plays an important role in learning English. As one of the basic language skills, it is thefoundation to improve students’ other skills, such as listening, speaking and writing abilities in languageacquisition. Students can also acquire knowledge and skills while they are reading. What’s more, readingcounts a large part in various grades of college English tests and other examinations, such as CET-4, CET-6,TEM-4, TEM-8, GRE, TOEFL, PETS and so on. The reading scores stand at the top position of theseexaminations. “For many students learning English, reading is by far the most important of the four skills ina second language, particularly in English as second or foreign language”.(Carrel, 1989). English readingcompetence is the basic prerequisite to developing other kinds issue of language competence. Thus, how tochoose right teaching methods is great importance for English teachers.The traditional English teaching methods are still used by many teachers in English reading class. Forthe traditional reading teaching, the teachers explain the new words, sentence structures and grammaticalknowledge, and later ask students to translate some important sentences. Teachers control the class all thetime, so the chances for students to do some reading work independently are quite few, thus, quite fewstudents can improve their reading ability quickly. In this thesis, the author tries to find out a good way forEnglish teachers to improve students’ reading comprehension in class and help them to solve the problemsin reading speed or reading efficiency. Under the new teaching method, the students participate in the classpositively and the systematical trainings they receive enhance their reading proficiency independently.
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1.2Significance of the Study
English reading is very important in college English teaching, which is crucial and cannot be ignored.What’s more, the reading course has great impact on the progress and development of other aspects inlanguage acquisition. Doing much reading can help a student remember a lot of new words, phrases andsome expression ways. The significance of this research is represented as follow: First, this study can helpus understand the nature and process of reading comprehension. According to the schema theory, reading isan interactive process between the reader’s background knowledge and the text (Carrell, 1983), andbetween new information and old knowledge store (Anderson & Pearson, 1984). Reading involveslinguistic knowledge and readers’ own knowledge of the world as well. The process of readingcomprehension is guided by the principle that every input is mapped against some existing schema and thatall aspects of that schema must be compatible with the input information. Second, the present researchexplores how the three schemata influence English major students’ reading comprehension, and it willprovide empirical evidence in Chinese context to further verify the implications of schema theory onEnglish major students’ reading comprehension. Third, the research is helpful to improve the presentsituation of teaching reading in China’s EFL classroom. At last, Chinese English learners will benefit fromthe finding of present research.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Schema and Schema Theory
The use of schema as a basic concept was first used by a British psychologist named Frederic Bartlettas part of his learning theory. Barlett’s theory suggested that our understanding of the world is formed by anetwork of abstract mental structures. Kant (1781) pointed out that readers’ background knowledge playedan important role in the process of comprehension. Bartlett (1932) developed “schema theory” and furtherexplained how a reader uses his background knowledge to understand a text. He reported that readers’reading comprehension mainly relies on their own knowledge structure. The readers can not betterunderstand the text if they do not know the related background knowledge or can not use the backgroundknowledge successfully. Schema theory describes the process by which readers combine their ownbackground knowledge with the information in a text to comprehend that text. Readers carry differentschemata (background information), which is often culture-specific. Schema theory is based on the beliefthat “every act of comprehension involves one’s knowledge of the world as well” (Anderson et al. Carreland Eisterhold 1983:73). According to schema theory, reading a text is an interactive process in which areader uses his prior knowledge, experience, language to expect and comprehend the text. Efficientcomprehension requires the readers have the ability to relate the text to their own knowledge.
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2.2 Studies about Reading and Reading Process
Since the 1970s, the concept of reading theory has been explored in many areas. Such as cognitivepsychology, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, anthropology and applied linguistics. Goodmandescribes reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game” (1971: 135) and puts forward that “Reading is apsycholinguistic process in that it starts with a linguistic surface representation encoded by a writer andends with meaning which the reader constructs. There is thus an essential interaction between language andthought in reading. The writer encodes thought as language and the reader decodes language as thought”(Goodman, 1976). According to Michael (1977: 54), “reading is the reconstruction in the mind of meaningencoded in print.”, “Reading is essentially concerned with meaning, especially with the transfer of meaningfrom mind to mind; the transfer of a message from writer to reader. The highest level of reading is readingfor meaning” (Nuttall, 2000). That is to say, reading is a process of interaction among the reader, writer andthe text.To sum up, reading is a complex information processing skill in which the reader interacts with text inorder to create or recreate meaningful discourse. It involves the dynamic interaction among the reader’sexisting knowledge, the specific text being read, and the situational context of reading.
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Chapter Three Methodology ...... 17
3.1 Research Questions .......... 17
3.2 Subjects ....... 17
3.3 Instruments ......... 18
3.3.1 Materials.......... 19
3.3.2 Questionnaire ......... 19
3.3.3 Interview.......... 20
3.4 Procedures of the Study.... 21
3.5 Data Collection and Analysis......... 22
Chapter Four Results and Discussion ..... 25
4.1 Data Analysis of the Questionnaire....... 25
4.2 Different Roles of Three Schemata in Reading ......... 27
4.3 Teachers’ Views on Schema Theory..... 30
4.4 Application of Schema Theory to EFL Reading Class ..... 31
Chapter Five Conclusion ..... 41
5.1 Major Findings .......... 41
5.2 Limitations of This Study........ 42
5.3 Suggestions for Future Studies....... 42
Chapter Four Results and Discussion
4.1 Data Analysis of the Questionnaire
Based on the results shown in Table 4-1 and Table 4-4, it is addressed that content schema is the mostimportant factor in improving English major students’ reading comprehension ability. The mean scores ofthe first four items related to content schemata are 4.14, 3.78, 3.30, and 3.03 respectively (presented inTable 4-1), which are significantly higher than those of other items in Table 4-2 and Table 4-3. The resultstrongly proves that content schema has greater influence on readers’ reading ability. These data suggestthat one of the most important reasons why students can not understand a text is that they are not familiarwith the background knowledge of the text. They can not relate the text to their previous knowledge inmind, and they can not grasp the main idea properly, even if they comprehend most of the words, phrases,and sentences. Therefore, many problems in reading comprehension are traceable to deficits in relevantknowledge rather than deficits in linguistic skill narrowly conceived; that is, the readers may not possessthe schemata needed to comprehend texts. They may possess relevant schemata but not know how to bring them to bear. They may not be facile at changing schemata when the first one tried to proves inadequate;they may, in other words, get stuck in assimilating text in inappropriate, incomplete, or inconsistentschemata. All of these situations will lead to miscomprehension.
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Conclusion
This thesis has attempted to discuss how the content schema influences English major students’reading comprehension. According to schema theory, reading is the process in which readers combine theirown background knowledge with the information in a text to understand the text. So schemata play animportant role in students’ reading comprehension. It is essential for teachers to help students to build newschemata and activate their background knowledge to comprehend the text. This paper is a tentative investigation into the implications of the three schemata on English majorstudents’ reading comprehension. The major findings are presented as follows: Linguistic schema, formalschema and content schema all have influence on English major students’ reading comprehension, but indifferent degree; compared with Linguistic schema and formal schema, content schema has moresignificant influence on English major students’ reading comprehension.
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Reference (omitted)