II. The Schema Theory

Nowadays, the studies of schema theory and English reading teaching become more and more prevalent in many countries. The definition, classification and features of schema are presented in this part.

2.1 The Definition of Schema

   Kant firstly coined the schema in 1781, however, it was first used by Bartlett in 1932. He 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 his Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Schema, as people’s experiences of events, is shaped by their expectations or prior knowledge. Later, Kitao regarded schema as hypothetical mental structures which incorporate general knowledge into an organizational framework (Kitao 9). The schema is based on the assumption that knowledge stored in our minds is well-organized into interrelated patterns rather than randomly structured. These patterns are constructed from all our previous experiences of a given aspect of the experiential world, and they enable us to make predications about future experience. It says that people recall their own background and knowledge of text by experiencing things. When people read text, they need to reconcile it with their previous experience. In any case, people are active creators of our their knowledge. To do this, people must ask questions and assess what they know.

2.2 The Classification of Schema

    Carrel is very famous investigator on schema theory. He wrote a number of papers on reading comprehension. And Carrel regarded schema as “large complex units of knowledge that organize much of what we know about general categories of objects, classes of events, and types of people”(Carrel 84). According to Carrel, there are three types of schemata: linguistic schema, formal schema, and content schema.