A large number of researches have been conducted both abroad and at home about applying the schema theory to reading comprehension。 

2。2。1 Previous researches on schema theory abroad

Johnson (1981) carried a study to investigate the influence of the cultural sources on the reading comprehension。 Half of the participants read the un-adapted English texts of two stories, one from Iranian folklore, and the other from American folklore, while the other half read the same stories in adapted English。 Results revealed that the origin of the story in the culture and semantic complexity of the story had greater impact on comprehension than syntactic complexity。 Another experiment conducted by Johnson in 1982, which was set to test the impacts of the reading comprehension of constructing background knowledge。 The research result suggested that the background knowledge gained by the personal previous experience would be helpful for students to comprehend the given passage despite the unknown vocabulary。 In other words, new words wouldn’t seem to play a vital role in understanding the article。

Carrell (1987) tried to conduct a research to examine the combined interaction of content and formal schema in a single study, distinct from many researches which studied them separately。 The experiment showed that teaching textual structure knowledge could help students to improve their reading comprehension ability。 Later, Wallance (1992) carried out an experimental study of the influence of teaching to build new knowledge of reading comprehension when reading on a topic for which the subjects had previous or cultural knowledge。 The study proved that teaching students a new topic could be helpful for students to build schemata。文献综述

Goodman (1996) performed a research on the effectiveness of previewing ability in students’ comprehension of English materials, and teaching them to read for information。 In his research, previewing was accomplished by introducing students to the themes of a text and asking them to freely write on some of the opinions in that text, which pushes students to make predictions about the text。

Nigel Stott (2001) held the opinion that enough extensive reading could encourage students to activate prior knowledge。 The schema will become abundant during the extensive reading process, and it changes systematically as learners grow up。

Neil (2003) provided teachers with some practical classroom activities to activate prior knowledge, such as pre-reading discussion, semantic maps, the activation of text organization, prediction and so on。

2。2。2 Previous researches on schema theory at home

In China, some scholars have also conducted researches based on schema theory since it was first introduced to China。 Since 1985, the Schema Theory have been accepted by Chinese scholars and adopted in the second language reading research。 来*自-优=尔,论:文+网www.chuibin.com

In 1988, Qi Luxia and Wang Chuming (24-30) conducted a study to investigate the influence of background and complicated language knowledge on English reading comprehension。 The result showed that the influence of background knowledge was more than that of complicated language knowledge in English reading comprehension。 In 2004, Wei Han and Zhang Baicheng conducted a survey, which showed that in the last 10 years from 1987 to 1996, there were only 18 articles on schema theory published。 Since then, domestic studies in this field entered into an active period。 More and more researchers have begun to pay more attention to schema theory。 They tried to find out the different phenomena of reading comprehension from the perspective of schema theory。 In the following years, lots of relevant articles have been steadily increasing, such as The Application of the Schema Theory in EFL Reading in Senoir English by Yang Yonggang (2001), Schema Theory and English Reading Comprehesion in Senior Middle School by He Yunan (2003), Schema Theory and English Reading Comprehension by Li Aihua (2006)。