Application Of Schema Theory In Teaching College English Writing

Cultivating students' writing competence is one of the most important objectives in college English teaching, but Chinese students' average writing proficiency is comparatively low. Improving students' writing ability has become the urgent task for English teachers. Writing is a very complex cognitive process in which students have to retrieve and use the information stored in the mind. The present thesis compares three major approaches to teaching writing in current China, only to find that none of these approaches are perfect and moreover they all neglect the role of students' background knowledge, i.e. schema in writing.The wide application of schema theory in teaching reading and listening has shown that students' acquisition of new knowledge and comprehension are facilitated under the guidance of schema theory which emphasizes students' cognitive structure and information processing. However, the empirical study of applying schema theory in teaching writing is sparse. Therefore, this thesis tries to discuss how to apply schema theory into teaching college English writing with the consideration of the components of writing. The relationship between schema theory and English writing is illustrated from the aspects of different types of schemata in writing, the functions of schema theory in information processing, etc. Meanwhile, an experiment has been implemented to prove that schema theory has an effective instructional role in writing. The experimental subjects were 37 non-English major freshmen in one class. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were adopted in analyzing the data collected from the writing tasks, questionnaires and face-to-face interviews to find the differences after training. At the beginning of the experiment, the questionnaires were made to survey the situation of students' knowledge about writing. Then within three months, a series of teaching strategies under the guidance of schema theory were carried out to help students activate prior schemata and build up new schemata, and finally to optimize students' content and form in writing and improve students' writing proficiency.Research findings show that the schema-oriented instruction is an effective, concrete and systematic means for teaching college English writing, which can improve students' writing proficiency. It can not only accumulate students' knowledge about the world, cultivate students' right way of thinking in writing an English composition, but also expand and enrich students' linguistic schema, formal schema and content schema. Particularly, the schema-oriented instruction can raise students' awareness of the textual knowledge of English genres, textual structures, etc. The study also discovers that the teaching college English writing under the guidance of schema theory pays enough attention to students' cognitive psychology and is helpful for students to overcome the scare in English writing, playing an active leading role in the writing task. Besides, the study extends the scope of the research on schema theory, and provides some reliable data and effective teaching strategies for teaching and research of college English writing so as to promote students' writing proficiency.