A Study On College EFL Writing Teaching-From The Perspective Of Schema Theory

Writing came into being with the evolution and development of human civilization. Meanwhile, the emergence of writing has also pushed and enhanced the development of human civilization. Nowadays, writing has become an essential means of communication in our daily life. From the 1970s, with the reform and opening up policy carried out in China, international contacts have become more and more frequent. With the rapid development of the world economy, English has been widely used as an international language throughout the world. English writing is playing a more and more important role in international communication.So in the present college EFL (English as a foreign language) teaching, to cultivate and develop college students'competence of English writing is of great necessity both for their present study and future job. English writing has been the weakest part of English teaching. Meanwhile, in the process of English learning, compared with the other linguistic skills of reading, listening and speaking; writing has long been considered to be the most difficult and least interesting skill to develop. English writing is always a headache both for learners and teachers. So the cultivating of students'English writing competence is a demanding undertaking to be fulfilled by numerous EFL teachers in China. So the research on English writing teaching should be strengthened to better guide the writing teaching and learning. The present study tries to discuss English writing from the theoretical perspective of the schema theory.The concept of schema was first proposed by Kant in the year 1781, while the modern concept of schema theory was further developed by Bartlett in the 1930s and Rumelhart in the 1970s. Since the 1970s, studies and research have been widely done on how to apply schema theory to EFL teaching both abroad and at home. And it has been successfully applied to the instructing of EFL receptive skills of reading and listening. But the research on the application of schema theory to productive skills, that is, writing and speaking is scarce. Based on these achievements, the author intended to tentatively apply schema theory to the skill of writing. With this idea in mind, to find a more effective way to teach English writing in the Chinese context she carried out the present study.In the first chapter, the author made a critical review on the three major approaches to writing teaching abroad and the present writing studies in China. Then she made a review on the development and evolution of schema theory. In the second chapter she incorporated schema theory into EFL writing, with the introduction of the relationship between reading and writing, which illustrated that reading and writing are inter-related, without reading, the improvement of writing is impossible. To investigate Chinese college students'schematic knowledge in English, a research which is described in chapter three was carried out. The research was implemented in the form of one writing task and one questionnaire. It was made on 100 students of second year non-English majors from Shandong Agricultural University. The results from the research fully proved the theoretical discussions of the study and indicated that most of the errors that the subjects committed can be attributed to the lack of some schematic knowledge needed for English writing. To solve the problem, based on the results and discussions obtained in chapter three, implications on how to improve students'writing competence were proposed in chapter four in the hope of offering some suggestions on EFL writing teaching in the Chinese context.