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However, what is pitiful is that in our country, schema theory is not so widely applied to and concentrated on by English reading teaching as most European or American countries. In this point, this paper serves as an introduction to schema and schema theory and a tentative study of its application to English reading teaching.
II. The Definition and Development of Schema Theory
The role of background knowledge in language comprehension has been formalized as SHEMA THEORY (Bartlett, 1932; Rumelhart, 1980). Frederic Bartlett (1932) is usually acknowledged as the first psychologist to use the term “schema” in the sense that it is used today. According to Bartlett in his book “Remembering” (1932:201), the term SHEMA referred to “an active organization of past reactions, or past experience.” The term active was intended to emphasize what he saw as the constructive character of remembering, which he contrasted with a passive retrieval of “fixed and lifeless” memories.
In 1970s, Rumelhart explained that “the schema is the building blocks of cognition.”(Bartlet 10) For example, the people don’t have the definition of MP4 before it is invented. But now, with the popularizing of MP4, there is a definition of MP4 in people’s mind that is the MP4 schema. The schema helps the people to make up a picture of MP4 that have been seen and to know the different kinds of MP4s and the things that are similar to the MP4s later.
That is to say, although still debatable, schema is generally being referred as a mental structure. It is abstract because it does not relate to any particular experience, although it derives from all the particular experience we have had. It is a structure because it is organized; it includes the relationships between its components (Christine 2002).
Some other researchers all contributed a lot to the development of schema theory. Therefore, it was in the late 1970s that statements of schema theories began to emerge and to be applied to entities like stories and processes like reading. Concurrently, schema-theoretic notions became the driving force behind empirical investigations of processes in reading.