This study, based on the schema reading theory, investigates students' reading comprehension from an interaction of textual form with the students' pre-existing habit of mental representation. In spite of the beginning English majors' difficulty in confronting texts with all its complexity and foreignness, we reading teachers have to include a substantial amount of literary reading materials. Students indicate that they do not comprehend much in their prereading. Even after class discussion, they still cannot understand well or appreciate much of a piece of work. They do not understand the style and structure of the text. Designed to investigate students' difficulties in understanding literary discourse, this study takes up a typical example, analyzes the students' difficulties with reference to the schema theory applied to reading, and discusses their pedagogical implications. Without the teacher's help, students read "The Open Window," a short story by Saki(H. H. Munro). After reading, they were asked to answer a six-item test and an open-ended question. The contents of the answers were analyzed and pedagogical implications were discussed. The results reveal that, beyond the elementary aspects of language schemata-vocabulary and syntactic structure, and text schemata-literary forms and conventions, students generally need assistance in getting reading experiences to enrich their world schemata.
