A Study Of Improving English Writing Ability In Senior Middle Schools By Applying Schemata Theory

The schema theory has been applied in reading comprehension teaching. It is also used for listening comprehension; cloze test; blank, etc. However, schema theory in English writing teaching is sparse, especially in senior middle school students' English writing.The thesis tries to describe how to use the schema theory in Senior Grade Two. After fourteen weeks' experiment research by means of students' questionnaires, we drew a conclusion that the factors that affected the students' writing ability were lack of vocabularies, unable to use words correctly and make sentences in a right way, short of making plans before writing and using writing strategies and so on. After one term's writing teaching, we tried to analyze and discuss the conception of schema, that is, the relationship between the students' information structure in their memories and the students' writing, how schema worked in the process of students' writing and the problems that often appeared in the students' compositions. We also did our best to cultivate the solutions to solve these problems so that more effective communicative goals could be achieved. The experiment was to testify that by means of enlarging the students' vocabularies and improving their abilities of making sentences the students' writing competence could be greatly improved. Meanwhile making the schemata already existing in students' mind and help them construct new writing schema were also helpful to their writing.The thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter â…  put forward the significance of the research, analyzing the problems that the students had in writing. We also discuss the questionnaires about situations on the students' writing so as to show how necessary it is to improve the condition.Chapter â…¡ mainly revised the researches concerning schema and writing home and abroad.In chapter â…¢, we tried to introduce the schema theory and its effects on writing from three aspects: 1.Schema and vocabulary. Before writing, schema was used to activate the vocabularies students had already learned so as to form the helpful collections for their writing. 2. Schema and grammar. This mainly refers to the ability to make sentences, sentence accuracy, tenses, voices, moods and so on. 3. Schema and discourse. Upon the base of vocabularies and grammar, the students begin to considercomprehensively the cohesion of the text, rhetoric and style, the writing intension of the composition etc.Chapter IV and V are the key parts of the thesis. We offered a description in details on the procedures of the experiment and analyzed the data collected after the experiment. In this way, we drew the conclusion that schema theory is very effective in improving the students writing competence.