As we all know that reading is a very complex process。 What’s more, reading plays an important part in foreign language teaching and learning, for it is one of the most essential ways to gain foreign language knowledge and skills．For most students，especially for Senior High School students reading is by far the most important one of the four skills in English language learning。 With the development of college entrance examination, the proportion of reading comprehension is increasing continuously。 However, what perplexes the teachers and students is that little achievements or reading comprehension has been made though a large amount time and energy has been spent。 Hence how to improve students’ reading ability currently becomes an urgent and hard-thinking problem for most of English teachers。 The method the thesis will discuss would provide an effective solution to the problem。

Based on specific reading texts, the author tries to study on the application of schema theory in English reading teaching in senior high school。 It aims to improve students’ reading ability by a schema-oriented teaching method。 In the thesis firstly the author will introduce some relevant theories。 Then show the application of schema-oriented teaching method in senior high school。 In this part, the author tries to illuminate the specific teaching method based on some reading material。 At last, the author will conduct an experiment to test the effectiveness of the method。     

2。 Literature Review

2。1 Schema theory

Some scholars give definitions of schema and schema theory in various ways。 The word “schema” was first introduced By the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the year 1781．He believes that concepts stored in people’s memory are not in a separate way but in an inter-related way。 Then, Bartlett(1932), in his Remembering：A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology defined “schema” as “an active organization of past reactions or past experiences, which must always be supposed to be operating in any well—adapted organic response”。 In addition, another linguist Rumelhart (1997) had a metaphor that all knowledge can be packaged into units．We can see these packages as schemata。 He had described schema theory as a theory to show information and represent language in minds．

According to the above opinions，Nuttall(2002)came up with a view that knowledge is

acquired from the previous experience and concepts which are stored in one’s mind, and the schema just refers to the stored knowledge and its storage structure。 Generally speaking, schema emphasize the function of previous knowledge and experiences of the readers．It can assist the readers to set up new schema so that they can deal with reading texts easily．

     In addition, Carrel had ever proposed modern schema theory。 He argued that the schema in readers’ mind exist more than one types, namely formal schema and content schema。 Later the third type--linguistic schema was included。 These three types of schema work together to make a difference in reading comprehension。

1) Linguistic schema文献综述

     Linguistic schemata refer to readers’ existing language proficiency in vocabulary, phrase, sentence, grammar and paragraph．“Linguistic or language schema includes the decoding features needed to recognize words and how they fit together in a sentence” (Aebersold&Field 1997，cited in Liu Na 2012)

2) Content schema

     Content schema is the background knowledge，which is relevant to the content domain of a text (Carreu&Eisterhold 1983)。 for instance, the knowledge of religion, culture, a country’s racialism or economic condition, etc。 As we all know, although we recognize the large proportion of word in a passage, sometimes it is still difficult to fully make out what the texts mean。 Thus, it is necessary to rich readers’ content schema knowledge。