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Hence, it is very important to cultivate the students’ reading abilities in the comprehensive development of students. However, the current situation of reading teaching in Chinese junior middle schools is not optimistic because there are some difficult problems: some teachers are still using traditional methods, which always put emphasis on teaching and learning vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure and so on. Therefore, it is exigent for teachers and educators to employ a better method as their reading instruction to guide students to improve their reading ability. Many studies show that schema theory is proving to be an effective approach to improve students’ reading ability.
Therefore, the title of this paper is the application of Schema Theory to English reading teaching in junior middle school. The paper can be pide into five parts. Part one is the introduction to the research background, and research significance of the paper. Part two discusses the schema theory in details, including its definition, characteristics, types and functions. Part three introduces the definition of reading comprehension, three reading models, and the relationship between schema and reading. Part four is the main body, this part first introduces the present situation of English reading teaching in junior middle, and then talked about the application of schema theory to English reading teaching in junior middle school. However, the application of schema theory also has its limitations, this part also fingers out some methods to deal with. Part five is the conclusion of the whole paper.
II. Schema Theory
2.1 Definition of Schema Theory
The term of schema comes from Greek and in 18th century the philosopher Kant once explained the philosophic meaning of schema, in which the schema was taken as the connection between the concept and the perceptive object on the assumption that the pure concept existed in human’s mind. Later, it was developed into the schema theory.
Bartlett regards the schema as an existed knowledge framework where each kind of knowledge interacts with each other ceaselessly (7). When human meets with new experience, they can understand them on the condition of connecting these new experiences with the former schema. Therefore, the schema theory is a theory which intends to analyze how this knowledge framework works in the process of reading based on this psychological theory.
Rumelhart thinks that schema theory is a theory about how knowledge is represented in one’s mind and used (19). Based on his schema theory, the knowledge is a11 packed into units called schemata. Carrel believes that schema is the large complex knowledge units which organize the knowledge concerning the general classifies of targets, different events and human’s types (32).
Later, Cook presents the notion of schema as a mental representation of a typical example, and it helps human to know the new experiences through activating the related schema in the people’s mind (54). He puts emphasis on the cognitive features of the structure and make it possible for us to connect the current information with our previous information which relates to common and specialized knowledge.
When students are reading, the schema theory can help them to reduce the gaps between what they have already known and what they need to know (Deng 42). In addition, the schema theory has important influences not only on the first language but also on the second language teaching and learning. Therefore, teachers in middle schools should have a better comprehending of schema theory and use it in class to help students finish the reading comprehension successfully.
2.2 Types of Schema Theory
At the beginning of 1980s, Carrel, a famous researcher on schema theory who has defined two types of schema: content schema and formal schema (17). But later, most scholars think that the reader’s reading ability is determined mainly by three schemata: language schemata, formal schemata and content schemata.