【正文】 chieve the following purposes. First, teachers should pay attention to raising students’ linguistic petence. Here, the linguistic petence we mentioned refers to not only the reading ability, but also some other basic abilities, such as the enlarging of vocabulary, being familiar with and mastering various sentence patterns and linguistic phenomenon, prehending the register of mon used words and some other relation of language usage extensively and deeply. Second, teachers should bare in mind to widening students’ background knowledge. Here the background knowledge refers to the background of English literature and mon knowledge as well. The mon knowledge mentioned relates to sociology, psychology, international politics and economy, medical science, education and technology. Moreover, the reading instruction should teach basic reading prehension skills, especially reallife reading skills such as reading for gist and reading for information, develop flexible reading skills (varied according to purpose) and critical reading skills, develop the learners’ knowledge of vocabulary or idiom, reinforce (or even) present certain grammatical features and act as a stimulus for oral or written work later on.5. Practical use in reading teachingFrom the perspective of schema theory, we know that reading is an interactive function of the reader’s possessing and activating the appropriate schemata in the process of interacting with a passage. For readers who are unable to understand the reading materials, teachers should always be aware of the fact that their reading difficulties cannot be traced either to specific language features of the material or only to the lack of relevant background information. In fact, some reading difficulties are the result of lack of relevant schemata. It is also likely to happen that even though readers possess the appropriate schemata required for the material, a failure in understanding may be caused by the readers’ inability to activate the relevant schema. In this sense, classroom teachers and material writers have the responsibility to be sensitive to whether students possess the relevant schemata at first. If students do not, they should be able to provide students with suitable activities to make them acquire new appropriate schemata. Even when the students possess the appropriate schemata, teachers should also be able to supply them with suitable activities to activate their relevant schemata. Schema theory does not give specific guidelines on which part of schema is more important for students’ reading ability, but with the understanding of the reading process, several methods or classroom techniques are available for teachers. Material selectionConsideration has to be given in selecting suitable material for students to read and learn. Otherwise it is beyond their abilities to process the selected materials, and it will keep them from their normal schema acquisitions. So the depth of the reading material has to be patible with their schemata. The knowledge of students’ schemata and how their schemata are formed will help to predict their responses, their feelings, their thoughts and their acceptance of the materials. To know what they have learnt and how they use their existing knowledge to solve their problems are prerequisites for the understandings of schema input acquisition. (W illiams, 1984)According to Eskey and Grabe, the basic principle underlying the act of choosing reading material is that students should be able to read interesting and relevant texts on a regular basis in sufficient amounts. Here, the interest, relevancy, regularity and quantity of reading instruction are the most important determinants in whether, and to what degree, students do in fact develop reading skills. Another useful technique suggested by Krashen is narrow reading. This refers to reading that is confined to a single topic or to the texts of a single author. Krashen argues that narrow reading facilitates language acquisition because vocabulary and structure tend to be recycled by the writer, so narrow reading provides a builtin review and allows appropriate schemata to develop and grow. Accordingly, students can be more frustrated when they are given short and varied selections of reading because they are never allowed to adjust to an author’s writing style, to bee familiar with the specialized vocabulary of the topic, or to develop enough context to facilitate prehension. In this part, teachers should be aware of the distinction between language processing difficulties and information processing difficulties of inefficient readers. Certain materials should be selected to help them gradually bee more capable and more independent readers. These materials should contain carefully controlled language patterns which are mon in simple texts. Then when conceptual content is more familiar either because of a reader’s background or as a result of explicit instruction, the text with more plex language patterns should be provided. Increasingly, readers would be expected to bee more independent, that is fully capable of dealing with both conceptual and linguistically plex material in foreign language. Schema activationResearch on schema theory has shown that students construct meaning by using their prior knowledge to interact with the text. However, just having prior knowledge is not sufficient, they must be activated in order to facilitate one’s current abilities to understand and learn. Teachers can use the following teaching methods to activate students’existing schemata. BrainstormingBrainstorming involves students in a rapidfire, freeassociation listing of concepts or ideas or facts or feelings relevant to some topic. In this part, teachers ask students to examine together the title of the material they are about to read. Teachers list on the blackboard all the information that es to mind as students read the title. Then the information is used to further r