There’re still many aspects that need to be improved in the teaching of English reading. Some teachers put more emphasis on the language points and the grammar analysis. They spend much time on explaining the language knowledge. With time passing by, students become less interested in the reading. As a result, their reading ability is little improved. According to schema theory, we may carry out some reading abilities to activate interest, and we should provide more background knowledge to help students understand the reading materials better.

From the above analysis, we can see that schema theory is helpful to the teaching of English reading.

2. Literature Review

Schema was first put forward by Kant in 1781.He believes that concept doesn’t carry meaning by itself; and it is meaningful just when it is related with something already known by people. Psychologist E.C Barlett (1932) defines schema as the active organization of former experience and reaction.

Anderson and Pearson (1984) stated that a schema is an abstract knowledge structure which the reader brings to the text while reading. It is abstract in the sense that it summarizes what is known about many cases that differ in many situations. And it is structured in the sense that it represents the relationship among its component parts. The significant assumption of the theory is that a text doesn’t have any meanings. Rather, it only provides directions for readers as for how they should reconstruct meaning from their prior knowledge, i.e., background knowledge, which is the general knowledge of the world stored in one’s mind. According to the model, comprehension is an interactive process between a read’s background knowledge and the text, and between new knowledge and old knowledge store.

Schemata are hierarchically organized form the most general at the top to the most specific at the bottom. Celce-Murcia (2000) pides the reading process into four stages: (1) clues to meanings are taken up from the page and transmitted to the brain; (2) the brain then tries to match existing knowledge to the incoming data to facilitate the information; (3) predictions are made about the content of the passage based on the existing experience; (4) the data is examined more closely and predictions are either confirmed or revised. The principle above results in two basic models of information processing: bottom-up processing and top-down processing. As to the former one, readers analyze each word for its meaning or grammatical characteristics and then accumulate meaning to form preposition. The top-down processing takes place when the system makes general predictions based on higher level, general schemata, and then searches the input for information to fit into these partially satisfied higher level schemata.