How to Cultivate Senior High School Students Reading Competence in English Teaching1. Introduction12. Three models in reading process32.1 Bottom-up model32.2 Top-down model42.3 The interaction of top-down and bottom-up processing53. Factors affecting reading63.1 Vocabulary63.2 Cultural background63.3 Materials73.4 Reading skills83.5 Reading habits94. How to cultivate senior high school students reading competence104.1 Teachers help104.1.1 Choosing materials114.1.1.1 Comprehensibility124.1.1.2 Simplification124.1.1.3 Interest134.1.1.4 Sufficiency134.1.2 To enlarge students schemata144.1.2.1 Content schemata144.1.2.2 Linguistic Schemata164.1.3 Training students to have proper strategies of reading184.1.3.1 Warming-up184.1.3.2 Prediction194.1.3.3 Fast reading194.1.3.4 How to make a summary214.2 Students effort outside the classroom224.2 .1 Read extensively224.2.2 To form virtuous circle of reading224.2.3 Keep on reading everyday235. Conclusion24References251. IntroductionReading as well as listening is a chief means of obtaining information, and it is one of the important means of gaining different kinds of knowledge and of benefiting from the achievements. Individuals could not advance without reading, for reading can arouse peoples curiosity about the world and then develops their qualities in English language and humanities. Reading is an important language input. Therefore, the study of how to make good use of this means of input and optimize the reading input is of great significance. With the aim of making students have access to a lot of comprehensible and effective reading texts, the difficulty of materials, the sufficiency of reading and the method of reading teaching should be well studied. What are your purposes for reading? It is not very likely that you are interested in the pronunciation of what you read, nor you are interested in the grammatical structure. You read because you do want to get information from what you read, as well as to get enjoyment, ideas, and feelings. According to Christine Nuttall (2002, 8), reading is concerned with the transfer of meaning from mind to mind, the transfer of a message from writer to reader. Meaning comes from an interaction between thought and language, because reading is an active and interactive process.Reading is so important that we cant get rid of it in our daily life. This is one of the reasons why we should cultivate reading competence. In order to cultivate reading competence, the difficulty of materials should be appropriate for us to read. If we keep on having access to the level of “i+1” advocated by Krashen (1997), we can improve reading ability. How does learner cultivate reading competence? It can be described as follows: When you are reading a material in a language you have not yet acquired completely, and you understand what is said, the writer “casts a net” of structures around your current level. The net may include previously learned knowledge and the new knowledge. This structure can be called schematic structure, which is an abstract knowledge structure. Based on Schema Theory, this thesis attempts to discuss how to cultivate senior high school students reading competence in English teaching. 2. Three models in reading processThe process of comprehension is guided by the principles that every input is mapped on some existing schema and that all aspects of that schema must be compatible with the input information. Nunan illustrates that this principle results in two basic models of information processing: the bottom up processing and top-down processing. However, neither of them alone could ensure an efficient reading. Generally, learners are encouraged to use them interactively in their reading.2.1 Bottom-up modelThis way of reading reflects the belief that reading comprehension is based on the understanding and mastery of all the new words, new phrases, and new structures. Therefore, readers in this way would concern new vocabulary and new structures first and then go over the text sentence by sentence. The reader builds up a meaning from recognizing letters and words, working out sentence structure. If our word knowledge is inadequate, or if the writers point of view is very different from our own, perhaps, we cannot believe that apparent message is really just what the writer intended. Besides, when we read something which does not contain any new words, but sometimes we still find it difficult to understand its meaning. For example, the sentence “It is a piece of cake” contains simple words, if we just decode every word, we dont know it describes the things which are easy.2.2 Top-down modelA different view believes that our background knowledge plays a more important role than new words and new structures in reading comprehension. This approach occurs when readers use prior knowledge to make predict