Application Of Schema Theory In Senior School Students’ English Argumentative Writing Teaching

Schema was put forward by German philosopher Immannel Kant in 1781 as a philosophy conception. With some other psychologists’ study, schema theory was developed and has taken on new significance. At present, there are many researches about schema theory applied to reading comprehension to improve the students’ reading ability. However, researches on schema theory applied to English writing for senior students to enhance their writing ability are neglected. This research focuses on the application of the schema theory to training senior students’ English writing aiming at utilizing schema theory in English writing and finding an effective way or methods to improve the writing ability of the students. Therefore, based on the on the interrelationship between schema theory and learning as well as the investigation of applying schema theory to language reading and listening, this present experiment will further research on the application of schema theory to EFL writing and is of greatly theoretical significance and practical value to improving the teaching quality and all-round development of English skills in teaching senior students.The research questions are:(1) what’s the current situation of learners’ argumentative writing?(2) Can the schema theory improve learners’ argumentative writing achievement? This study covers the period of three months. The subjects of the experiment are 110 senior two students from two classes in Lin Ze senior School and are divided into two groups. One was control group which is taught by traditional teaching method. The other is experimental group which is taught by schema method. This thesis begins with introduction. In this part, the problems existing in the weak productive skills, especially in the senior school students’ EFL writing are put forward. After that, the significance of the study is also expressed in this part. After Introduction is Chapter two Literature Review. This chapter reviews the previous major researches on EFL writing both abroad and at home. From the earlier researches, great progress made by the previous researchers in writing teaching can be seen. They offered evidence that proper pedagogical theory direction worked in improving the students’ writing proficiency. Chapter three introduces the Schema Theory and gives a rough sketch of the schema theory development. From the studies of a list of great language volunteers, schema theory proves a valid explanation for how learners process and interpret information, for which schema theory has been used as a guide for language teaching and learning. And this chapter also states the types of schema: linguistic schema, content schema, formal schema. Chapter four is research design. This is the key part of the thesis. It is the report of the study including the methodology and the whole experiment process in details. And three questions are proposed in this part. How all the data is collected and analyzed is also described in this chapter. The author in the procedure of this chapter shows how the schema theory has been used in guiding and improving the ability of the EFL writing of the senior school students. Chapter five is the Results and Discussion. This chapter proves with data that the EFL writing proficiency of the senior school students can be improved under the direction of certain proper pedagogical theory. It is just because of the lack of students’ content or formal schema and the failure of activating of the existed schema in their minds that influenced their writing skill.The Conclusion of the study is as follows:(1) Through the questionnaire and the pre-test we can see that the audience awareness almost doesn’t exist in their minds. Even if when they think about the problem, they only regard their teacher as their audience or readers instead of the English-speaking native audience. In addition, they have poor attitudes or interest towards the EFL writing and the lack of pedagogical theory training is also very evident.(2) Applying the schema theory to senior high school writing is an effective teaching method for students. it reduced students’ time spent on writing learning and the efficiency of classroom writing learning is also greatly improved.Through the experiment, we can see that the Ss’ writing performance had improved 5-6 score.