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1.3 Significance and Purpose of This Study
Therefore, as discussed above，it is urgent for teachers and educators to adopt a betterapproach as their reading instruction to guide students to improve their reading ability.During the past decades, reading theory in ESL research has come under the influence ofpsycholinguistics and Goodman's (1967, 1971, 1973a) psycholinguistic model of reading.Many studies show that schema theory is proving to be an effective approach to ESLreading research. A schema is “a data structure for representing the generic concepts inmemory" (Rumelhart 1980:34).Schema theory researches have emphasized the importance of background knowledgewithin a psycholinguistic model of reading. The role of background knowledge in languagecomprehension has been formalized as schema theory. According to schema theory,reading is a complex and active, in fact, an interactive process instead of a merelydecoding process. The text itself does not carry meaning. Rather, it provides clues toenable readers and listeners to construct meaning from existing knowledge一the textactivates and builds on existing schemata. Comprehending a text，then, becomes aninteractive process between the text and readers' background knowledge, and input is dealtwith in the terms of the schemata that readers bring with them. Efficient comprehensionrequires the ability to relate the text to the reader's own knowledge.

Chapter Two Literature Review

To understand the approach of schema theory to ESL reading in a second language,first of all, it is helpful to understand a bit about the knowledge of schema theory, such asthe definition, the characteristics, the types and the role of schemata in reading. Then wewill try to find out what reading means and how reading models evolve recently. Next wewill make a relatively thorough review of previous studies and researches of applyingschema theory to reading. Of course，this section is selective rather than exhaustive.

2.1Schema Theory

2.1.1 Definition of Schemata
The concept of schema (plural schemata)，can be traced to Plato and Aristotle(Marshall, 1995)，but Kant (1929) is generally considered to be the first to talk aboutschemata as organizing structures that mediate how we see and interpret the world(Johnson, 1987). As long as 1781，he claimed that new information, new concepts，newideas can have meaning only when they can be related to something the individual alreadyknows (Kant 1781/1963). Schemata are “a sort of bias inherent in the mind，,(Campbell，1989, p.90). For Kant, a schema stood between or mediated the external world and internalmental structures; a schema was a lens that both shaped and was shaped by experience.The British psychologist, Sir Frederic Bartlett，initially introduced the concept ofschemata into psychology and Education in his works. The term “schema’’ in Bartlett'sclassic book Remembering (1932: 201) refers to "an active organization of past reactions，or f^st experience." Bartlett (19-32/1995) used the term schemata and conductedexperiments to explore schemata as cultural constructs in memory，and this is the workmost widely cited by schema theorists working in the cognitive era (Saito, 19%). Hediscussed that schema as a本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。