The Implications Of Schema Theory On Business English Teaching

With the economic expansion and globalization, more and more learners in China join in the learning of Business English (BE). Teachers in China are working hard to find a way to teach BE effectively and to balance business and English, BE and General English (GE). Schema theory stresses on the shared knowledge of the world which helps the learning. In the 1930s, Bartlett put forward the notion that schema is "an active organization of past reactions or past experience". With schemata being dynamic, schema theory serves to investigate into the cognitive aspect of human learning process. BE learners are adults, they are comparatively mature in cognition ability, and are more likely to be affected by schemata of their own. Thus further investigation is made in the thesis into the nature of schemata and the features of BE in order to find the implications of schema theory on BE teaching.This thesis consists of five parts:Part I illustrates the development of schema theory and BE teaching as well as the goals and subjects of the thesis.Part II deals with the nature of schema theory. It begins with the development of schema theory, with a detailed analysis of Bartlett, Piaget and other related researchers' contribution to the theory. Then it proceeds to the general rules underlying the theory.Part III analyzes the features of BE. It starts from the definition of BE and proceeds with its lexical, textual features, duality and learners' needs with a detailed analysis on the BE learners' by questionnaire.Part IV states the implications of schema theory on BE teaching. BE learning, as a process, will be affected by the different types of schemata. The part tries to find out the linguistic, content, textual and script schemata involved in BE learning. Since the learning process is a combination of bottom-up and up-down processes, the part has a discussion on how to teach BE from the micro perspective of content, vocabulary, text, and how to facilitate the learning process from the macro perspective, with an emphasis put on the distinctive features of BE. Part V points out some limitations of the study as well as suggestions for further research.