Effects Of Schema-Based Instruction On College English Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Schemata are a person's existing concepts about the world, or in other words, are the previously acquired knowledge structures, including linguistic knowledge, cultural knowledge and so on. These schemata can be used not only to interpret but also to predict situations occurring in our environment. According to schema theory, when people try to learn new things, they need to connect acquired concepts and past experience (background knowledge) with new things. Interpretation of new things relies on the existing schemata, and the inputs should be consistent with them. In current practice, too many focuses have been put on the reading comprehension. The investigation attempts to provide some insight into the vocabulary learning of non-English majors in professional college.Based on schema theory in cognitive psychology, the present study examines the classification of vocabulary learning strategy, and point out that schema-based instruction mainly influences cognitive strategies in vocabulary learning strategies. 44 sophomores from Suzhou Institute of Trade and Commerce had participated in the study. The subjects were narrowed down to 40 for this investigation. The research used the instruments of test papers, questionnaire and interview. The collected data were analyzed by SPSS 13.0. Descriptive analyses in paired samples t-test were applied to find out the changes of students' vocabulary learning strategies in the experiment. And the interview was used to find out the reasons of these changes. The major findings can be summarized as follows.Firstly, schema-based instruction did positively influence students' vocabulary learning strategies. They could facilitate vocabulary learning. It was useful more generally for helping students explore cognitive strategies in which they could learn the vocabulary more effectively. The effective strategies included relating, grouping, guessing and using contextual knowledge to promote vocabulary acquisition. However, not all the strategies significantly changed. After the experiment, rote learning still played an important role in vocabulary learning. Yet, not all the learning methods were accepted by the students. The students could not effectively use imagery, affix and the same root and keyword to facilitate their vocabulary learning.Secondly, several key factors had been found to facilitate or inhibit the changes of students' vocabulary learning strategies. Facilitating factors included teacher's scaffolding, the improvement of memory efficiency under the schema-based instruction while the inhibiting factors were students' learning habits and the difficulty to execute the vocabulary leaning strategies.As well, the results of the research provide some pedagogical implications for English vocabulary teaching are presented: 1) Strategy instruction is a highly creative, multi-level process for teaching students to optimize their learning strategies as individuals. 2) The teacher should help students to build their background knowledge and develop students' ability of presupposition to activate the schema once existing in students' mind. 3) Students should be encouraged to learn vocabulary in context, to self-evaluate so as to find out the most suitable learning method on their own.