【正文】 s biography, which tells one’s life by another person. And this style of articles is usually written according to time order. The details of the form to show Nelson Mandela is as following: Table 1 Nelson Mandela’s life1918was born near Transkei (South Africa)1937entered university1940pleted law degree at the university1944formed ANC Youth League1952set up law office to help poor black people in Johannesburg1961government by and for white people set up in South Africa1962sentenced to five years1963ANC began to blow up buildings1964sentenced to prison for life on Robben Island1982moved to a prison in Cape Town1990released from prison1991became president of the ANC1993won the Nobel Peace Prize 1994became President of South Africa1999retired as President and returned to live in his hometownThanks to the table 1, students can easily understand Nelson Mandela life. It is beneficial to improve students’ reading speed. What the researcher wants to mention is that the researcher has asked students to do preparation before learning the text. When students listened to her explanation, they could prehend the general idea of the text. The whole process of explanation was very fluent. After the researcher finished the text, she gave some new inf。 different countries may have different customs。 “the brilliant history of Chicago Bulls” schema may touch the others. If the brand name “Nike” is added to “Michael Jordan”, then the higher schema of “advertisement” will be brought to readers’ mind. This “advertisement” schema will in turn activate either the highlevel schema of the fashion of popular stars in advertisement or the lowerlevel schema, for example, about “Nike” products. Pictures or diagrams provide parts of the information, too. They can be resorted to activate the appropriate schema. Practical application of schema theory in reading class Schema theory is plex and abstract. How to apply it into English teaching is a key question. It is impossible for teachers to explain the concept of schema theory as students’ receptivity is limited. It is difficult for students to understand or apply schema theory. Therefore, teachers should turn schema theory into activities. In this way, students can easily prehend schema theory. How to turn schema theory into activities? With the help of previous schema methods, the researcher takes one teaching case to discuss this problem. The researcher takes one lesson of Senior High School, Body Language from Unit 4 of Student’s Book 4 for example to explain the application of schema theory in practice. Firstly, the teacher shows some pictures such as smile, frown, embrace, handshake, and kiss etc. to the students and then put the pictures on the blackboard. In this way, students can gain information according to vision. During this course, content schema es into being in students’ mind. They may make hypothesis that the message will be learnt is about people’s expression and action. Secondly, the teacher writes the word (smile, frown, embrace, handshake, and kiss) under each picture on the blackboard. Seeing the words under the pictures, students’ brains produce Linguistic Schema. In this sense, the pictures match with the words. And then the teacher gives students a phrase: body language. The phrase can improve students’ original hypothesis in semantic aspect. Words as gesture, manner, custom, and municate are also showed to students. In this case, students’ content schema must be reactivated. They may produce association of ideas: different gestures express different meanings。c) providing some background。c) Whether the reader has a schema for some specific field and how professional his schema in this field is. Readers can be approximately classified as below. (An approximate classification is due to the consideration that very detailed one may plicate the analysis work and lead to the failure of locating the main problems.)readerLinguistic petence schema Poor readergoodweakweak goodweakweakGood readergoodgoodgoodweakThis diagram illustrates the following features of readers:a) Poor readers have stronger tendency of being weak in linguistic petence.b) A basic condition of being good readers is their good linguistic petence.c) Both good and weak readers share the overlapping feature of being good at linguistic petence and weak at schema.We will first focus our discussion on the reading instruction of the first category of readers in the perspective of schema theory. Observations in the reading reveal that schema theory turns out to be less valid to the readers with low linguistic petence, since schema method more or less has the characters of “topdown mode” which emphasizes processing from higherlevel skills. But automatic perception and decoding is the crucial foundation for initiating the higherlevel skills. When readers are in their low linguistic stage, they still cannot surmount the difficulty of decoding in order to base their prediction on or activate their schema. David E. Eskey (Patricia L. Carrell et al, 1988) pointed out that interactive processing should be the interaction between information obtained by means of bottomup decoding and information provide by means of topdown analysis. This statement strongly supports the belief that reading instruction should be “held in the bottom” without which neither interactive approach nor schema method can be effectively applied. Experiments prove that more time is consumed when using top skills like guessing, predicting and confirming. While the basic recognition of vocabulary and structure provides the primary information entailed for activating the concerning schema. Therefore, it is feasible to believe that schema method is less adaptable to the readers with low linguistic petence, since schema method cannot and should not be responsible for direct instruction of language acquis