Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
The traditional reading teaching method starts from the smallest unit of text, namely,from the letters and words to phrases, clauses and sentences to judge the author’s meaning inthe text. Specifically, it is the process by which readers reconstruct the author’s intendedmeaning from letters and words, and build up meanings of a text from the smallest units at the“bottom” (letters and words) to the larger units at the “top” (phrases, clauses and sentences).As Gough (1972) has pointed out: reading process starts from letters, to words, tosentences, and finally to meaning. This reading method is widely used in China and has animportant position in many teachers’ mind during teaching. Teachers emphasize more onlanguage knowledge, words and semantic decoding, which seriously limits the developmentof students’ reading abilities. Most of the students think the focus and center of reading is torecognize new words and phrases, neglecting to grasp the intended ideas that the authors want to express in the texts. Teachers did not pay attention to students’ understanding of culturalknowledge of the target language and, ignore the context, culture, background and so on, andtherefore, they can not motivate students’ enthusiasm in reading and improve students’reading comprehension. As a result, reading classes are teacher-centered, and studentsbecome passive learners.Due to the importance of reading and the present unsatisfactory situation of readingteaching mentioned above, researchers believe that it’s reasonable to recommend readingpractice based on the schema theory because it not only emphasizes the training of completeunderstanding of the text but also stresses the training of students to take part in an interactiveprocess in reading.
……………
1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
According to schema theory, reading includes not only the process of languageunderstanding started from words but also the process of overall cognition of the readingmaterials. At the same time, it is the process that readers and the author interact andcommunicate with each other. This theory is of great significance for reading teaching.Compared with the traditional English reading teaching method, it provides us a new theorybasis and some enlightenment. The application of schema theory in reading teaching canarouse students’ subjective initiative, and help students understand and grasp the author’sintention better. However, the author of this thesis think some research do not necessarily suitthe actual situation of Chinese students, therefore it’s meaningful to conduct some relatedteaching research suitable for Chinese students’ actual situation.In this thesis, an experimental study was carried out to show the effectiveness of theschema-oriented teaching method on college English reading teaching. This study aims toprove the practicability and applicability of applying the schema-oriented teaching approachin college English reading classes, to explore the relationship among schema, readingstrategies and reading comprehension, to show how the theory can influence the readingcomprehension and to search for a better teaching method to improve college students’reading comprehension.
……………
Chapter Two literature review
，英语论文范文，英语毕业论文 |
