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Schema Theory is a theory used to explain the psychological process of foreign language reading. Schema Theory reviews the rule that one’s existing knowledge structure influences his/her new knowledge structure, which affords theoretical foundation for people to learn a language and improve their ability to understand language. Schema knowledge is a crucial factor in students’ understanding, learning and remembering process. It helps students to understand the article, make predictions, regulate their attention, process significant information, search memories in an orderly way and improve their comprehensive language competence and reading comprehension ability. In order to finish a cloze test, one must build proper schema and fill in new information to make it concrete. The information students fill in is what they understand or speculate. With the build of linguistic schema, content schema and formal schema, students can overcome various obstacles they meet while finishing cloze test.
Cloze test counts a great part in English test in college entrance examination. It directly influences students’ total score. However, with various problems and inefficient strategies, students have low accurate rate in cloze test. Through making a comprehensive review of the dynamical and international studies of cloze test, the author found very few researches had been done in applying Schema Theory to cloze test.
This paper tries to explain that the application of Schema Theory to cloze test can help students to activate existing schema, replenish lacking schema and build up new schema. Moreover, it shows how to apply Schema Theory in cloze test with concrete examples. In this way, the research contributes to the full play of students’ initiative, helps to overcome the obstacles they come across while doing cloze test and arouse their interest in English learning.
The paper totally has five parts. The introduction part introduces the purpose and the background of the thesis. Part two introduces the definition and classification of Schema Theory. Moreover, this part illustrates the definition and relative research of cloze test. Part three discusses the feasibility of applying Schema Theory in cloze test. Part four introduces the model of applying Schema Theory in cloze test. The last part draws the conclusion that the appliance of Schema Theory provides advisable strategies for not only improving the teaching and learning level of cloze test but also enhancing students’ comprehensive language competence and reading comprehension ability.
2. Literature Review源/自:751:;论-文'网www.751com.cn
2.1 Schema Theory
Schema was first put forward by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1781 (Kant, 1781). It originally means “product of transcendental imagination”, “transcendental time definitive property”. Schema combined intellectual conception and perceptual experience, acting as a medium between concept and subject.
Cognitive psychologist Barlett described “schema” as an active developing model, and thus he proposed the study of applying schema theory in reading psychology (Barlett, 1932). He thought that schema can be used in language understanding. Readers can use activated knowledge structure in memory to replenish unexpressed details. Barlett was the first person who leaded Schema Theory in the psychological area and applied it in reading (Barlett, 1932).
American Artificial Intelligence expert Rumelhart presented “Schema Theory Model”, making great contribution to the perfection of Schema Theory (Rumelhart, 1980). In 1977, he pointed out that while reading a text, the knowledge he has stored in mind always connected with symbols in the text, which counts a lot for comprehending relevant information. He also explained schema in the building blocks of cognition. There are various kinds of schemata in human minds, schema of eating, schema of going to school and schema of having dinner in a restaurant. All these schemata are composed of many units—knowledge, experience and background information in people’s minds. Rumelhart emphasized background knowledge (language, culture and text structure) while reading an article (Rumelhart, 1980). The more background knowledge one has about an article, the more easily he/she can understand it.