Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Schema Theory has been applied in the teaching of reading for many years.According to Schema Theory, the text (written or spoken) does not by itself carrymeaning (Rumelhart, 1980). A text therefore only “provides direction for readers as tohow they should construct meaning that originates from their own background knowledge,or schema” (Farrell, 2017: 86). Reading then is an active activity of thinking and it is aninteractive process between readers' schema in mind and textual information, that is，newknowledge and information cannot be processed until it is connected with readers'existing knowledge framework. During the process of reading, readers firstly makeinferences and prediction by use of schema, and look for connected information in lightof such prediction and then modify or consolidate the prediction.Cognitive scientists studying story schemas provide a clear link between SchemaTheory and reading research in comprehension by exploring story structure and recall (e.g.Mandler & Johnson. 1977，qtd. in McVee. Bunsmore & Gavelek，2017); Other scholars(e.g. Anderson & Pearson, 1984; Bransford & Johnson, 1972，1973，qtd. in McVee,Bunsmore & Gavelek, 2017)，英语毕业论文，working primarily on investigations of readingcomprehension, contribute significantly to the work on schema and help bring schemaresearch into mainstream reading research. Since Schema Theory was introduced to China in the late 1980s, many scholars (e.g. Zhu, 1994; He, 1996; Lin, 2017) alsoconducted researches on the role of Schema Theory in English reading and confirmed itsvital function by deductive reasoning. As the theory develops, other scholars (e.g. Wu,2017; Gao, 2017) begin to conduct English reading teaching experiment in middleschools, vocational schools and colleges respectively by laying emphasis on activatingand supplementing students' schema and it turns out that such teaching method is in linewith students' cognition psychology and can guide students to read better, enhance theirreading ability and increase their interest in reading.
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1.2 Purpose of the Study
According to Schema Theory, reading is an interactive process between enteredinformation and the existing knowledge stored in readers' brain, or schema. Takingteaching activities related to schema before reading would help activate students' priorknowledge and construct new knowledge about the content of the text to have an effecton the new entered information during the process of reading, which can facilitatestudents' reading comprehension; post-reading activities related to schema can helpstudents modify, consolidate or construct their background knowledge after the schemasare instantiated in the reading. All these processes can contribute to improving students'reading ability, forming good reading habit as well as increasing their reading interest.Therefore, it is necessary and significant to know whether teachers in China'scolleges have paid attention to activating and complementing students' schemas so as tohelp them have better understanding, instantiating students' schemas during reading andhelping them to consolidate，英语论文题目，modify or reconstruct these schemas. Meanwhile, it isneeded to know what kind of schema would work belter to hit the target of reading fromstudents' point of view and therefore students' expectations towards these three kinds ofschema also
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