The Application Of Cultural Schema In College English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary is central to language and of critical importance to the English learner. Currently, although many teachers have recognized the significance of vocabulary teaching, systematic and effective methodology has not been established. Furthermore, the present situation of college students'learning is far from satisfactory, which directly causes the students'poor behavior in examination and communication. As a result, how to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of vocabulary teaching is a major problem to be solved immediately.As a psychological theory, schema theory was introduced to foreign language teaching in the 1970s. From then on, researchers and scholars in the field of teaching have made great efforts to apply this theory to foreign language teaching. Up to now, schema theory has been comprehensively adopted in reading, listening, translating and writing teaching. However, the efforts which are made to apply schema theory to the field of vocabulary teaching are relatively limited. With the development of globalization, intercultural communication has become more and more frequent. However, due to the misunderstanding of some culture-loaded words, the current students'performance in cultural communication still remains unsatisfactory. As a subclass of content schema, cultural schema can enable the learners to remove the obstacle of cultural differences by activating and creating the learners'cultural schema. So it is necessary to introduce cultural schema theory to the vocabulary teaching to improve students'competence in cultural communication.The thesis has conducted the experiment which lasted for a whole semester. The experiment is designed to study the effectiveness of cultural schema theory in collage English vocabulary teaching by comparing the results of control class and experimental class. The experiment utilizes a questionnaire and two tests—pre-test and post test. The questionnaire is designed to investigate the believes, strategies, tool and the awareness of cultural schema theory in vocabulary teaching. The tests are designed to compare the students'performance before and after the experiment. The data is processed by the SPSS software. The results of experiment prove that there is significant difference in the performance of control class and experimental class at the end of the semester. The experimental class scored higher than control class, which shows that the construction of cultural schema theory plays an important role in students'vocabulary learning.After analyzing the process and results of the experiment, the author put forward some pedagogical suggestions on vocabulary teaching. At first, the teachers should instruct the students to activate their pre-existing cultural schema, raise their schema awareness and figure out the schema phenomenon such as schema coincidence, schema absence and schema contradiction. Secondly, the teachers should help the students create new cultural schemata related to history, religion, geography, politics and customs. Thirdly, the teachers should enforce the students'culture schemata by etymology, association, word formation and multimedia material.Applying cultural schema theory to college English vocabulary teaching has great practical significance. The cultural schema theory can simplify the interpretation of intercultural communication by restructuring students'cultural knowledge to form an essential basis for language comprehension. In this way, the students can overcome the cultural obstacles effortlessly in their vocabulary learning. All in all, the teachers can greatly improve the students'effectiveness and efficiency in their vocabulary learning by constructing and adjusting the related cultural schemata.