Effective English reading requires readers not only possess good English grammar, flexible reading skills and plentiful vocabulary but also master rich cultural background knowledge.However, for the adult students educated in the Continuing Education College, it is rather obvious that they have troubles learning English The author of this thesis pro-posed a new idea of English reading teaching-teaching with allusions and their stories in English reading class.The author tries to apply the relationship between schema theory and reading in the process of teaching adult students so that they can get a deeper understanding of English allusions and their stories.The author of this thesis did an empirical research and made a quantitative analysis for pretest and posttest.The result of this research indicates that to improve English reading proficiency, either teachers or students should attach equal importance both to language structures and to cultural background knowledge.
