The Application Of Schema Theory In Senior High English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary is one of the three basic elements of English. The famous linguist Wilkins once said that "Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed" (1972:11). Mastering sufficient vocabulary will benefit our reading, listening, writing and speaking. An English learner with enough vocabulary, can have a conversation with the authors of the beautiful articles at heart; can enjoy the charm and joy brought in by letters; can understand more voices and become better informed; can grasp the main idea of what the music is trying to express; can receive sincere wishes people utter to us. So we can see how important the Vocabulary is!The most important points the schema theory wants to declare are:Firstly, according to Bartlett (1932), "That past experience cannot be an accumulation of successive individuated events and experience, it must be organized and made manageable—the past operates as an organized mass rather than as a group of elements each of which retains its specific character." Secondly, knowledge represented in the mind is selection, abstraction, interpretation, integration, and reconstruction. Individual pieces of information cannot exist in the mind on their own either; they have to be integrated into an organized and coherent representation. Finally, the theory presumes that learners recall or reconstruct the information with reference to the schema activated during encoding and decoding.For the senior high school students, though they have learned English for many years, they still have great difficulty in learning vocabulary. Therefore, as an English teacher, I think it is my duty to find an easy and effective way to help those poor guys for their English learning, especially the vocabulary mastering. The very way is using schema theory in vocabulary learning.