A Study Of The Schema Theory In Discourse Understanding And Generation

The thesis deals with discourse understanding, with a focus on the schema theory and its implications on receptive skills of reading and listening and productive skills of speaking and writing. Schema theory is one of the most important theories applied in discourse understanding. Only by a good mastery of the schema theory can we fully understand many psychological phenomena in discourse understanding. This paper aims at exploring the cognitive processes of understanding discourse by analyzing some modern schema theories. This research covers the historical development of the schema theory;the classifications of the schema theory;the functions of the schema theory in discourse understanding;the applications of the deductive models in discourse understanding;the schema theory and its implications in FLT. Meanwhile, discourse is product of the actual verbal communication, it is a semantic unit. Because it is the semantic unit, it means that it goes beyond the sentence level;however its scale cannot be defined on the basis of its length. Its length can be, either as short as a word or as long as a novel on condition that the discourse must play its communicative function in the particular context. In the foreign language teaching around the;world, just as linguists de Beaugrrande and Dressier (1981) says, The Foreign Language teaching is in an "unreliable state". Most of the foreign language learner cannot acquire proper or enough competence of the new language, which is taken as something normal in foreign language teaching and learning. The students who have learned the foreign language in the college for several years fail to write the authentic English articles. When they go abroad, they cannot communicate with the native speakers. The students cannot grasp the main idea of a text which does not consist of too many new words. This consequence is caused by just focusing attention on the word and sentence teaching in language teaching. They ignore the discourse production and discourse understanding. Schema theory is an outstanding one that has a profound effect on the receptive skills of reading and listening and productive skills of speaking and writing. This research concentrates on a tentative study of the Discourse Understanding Process Model (DUPM) and the Discourse Generation Model (DGM),which is a great help to improve the language learners' receptive and productive skills. The teaching model based on the schema theory stresses the importance of the prior knowledge in reading and writing. This dissertation is an attempt to discuss the application of activating students' linguistic schema and encyclopedia schema in understanding discourse so that they can acquire the communicative competence in real communication.