【Abstract】The introduction and development of schema models plays a significant role in second language reading.It has a profound impact on the field.Of course，schema approach has its own aspects that it is good at dealing with.These aspects may have a number of advantages both for students and teachers such as raising awareness of the importance of cultural differences，background knowledge，giving guidelines to students’ learning and teachers’ teaching of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge.By considering the limitations of their application to TESOL，and by evaluating the good points，some directions about second language teaching will be suggested.
　　【Key words】schema approach； reading； strengths and problems
　　Strengths
　　Application of psycholinguistic approach and schema approach in TESOL raises awareness of the importance of background knowledge for second language teachers and students.In TESOL，normally，students are multicultural and non-native speakers.They do not share the same background knowledge with their teachers and classmates.Consequently，building students.background knowledge is much more important for teachers，because background information contributes a lot to reading comprehension and other aspects of learning.
　　Perhaps the most significant advantage of applying schema theory in TESOL is the introduction of the interactive-model.As discussed in the above parts the interactive model seems to be the most efficient approach to reading.In addition，since schema approach encourages learners to interact with the text and engages learners in reading，it may have had a profound impact on vocabulary and grammatical knowledge.
　　Before the schema approach emerges，second language reading is dominated either by bottom-up processing or by top-down process.But both top-down and bottom-up have limitations.One of the shortcomings of bottom-up processing is that it failed to recognize the contribution of context and background knowledge to word recognition and comprehension（Samuels