Application Of Cognitive Load Theory To Teaching College English Writing

In the five skills of English including listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation, writing mostly reflects students'comprehensive ability of applying language. In China, teaching English writing is always a hard part. As a result, more and more people have paid attention to this embarrassing condition. In spite of the intense studies concerning English writing in recent years, the effects are not satisfactory. Cognitive-load theory, which explores and solves problems in study, has caused great influence on some learning fields, such as cognitive psychology, educational psychology and educational technology since it came into being in 1980s, but it has no much research on teaching writing. This study attempts to explore the effectiveness of cognitive-load theory-oriented writing teaching approach, improving their writing ability.The author conducted an empirical study on the application of cognitive-load theory in college teaching English writing, and put forwards one research question, namely, whether cognitive-load theory exerts impact on the development of students'writing ability; if the answer is yes , on which aspect for students'English writing does cognitive-load theory have the most influence? During the study, both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed. A questionnaire to 120 non-English majors who are in Grade two in North University of China was carried out to collect information about the current situation of English writing learning and teaching in order to arrange proper teaching methods in the experiment, achieving better and more significant effects. Then the author analyzed the data through SPSS, including descriptive analysis, means comparison, independent-samples t test and paired sample test. Besides, 5 subjects in the experimental group accepted the author's interview. By these steps, the author aimed at getting some objective and effective findings.Through analyzing the data from the experiment and discussing the interview results, the author draws her conclusions:(1) Cognitive-load theory plays a vital role in improving students'writing ability;(2) For average students, the improvement of formal schema through the author's instructional designs is relatively easy compared with the progress of vocabulary schema and content schema.