| It would be an empty talk to build a house without building materials. Similarly, it would also be a castle in the air to listen to, speak, read English or write in English and so on without mastering a certain amount of English vocabulary, which is just so-called"with the skin gone, what can the hair adhere to– a thing cannot exist without its basis". Vocabulary is the building materials of a language, the success of second language acquisition (SLA) mainly depends on the quality and quantity of vocabulary acquisition. Therefore, vocabulary is a very important component of second language acquisition,"vocabulary is a unit of meaning, and meaning plays a central role in the production, listening, storing and indexing of language"(Gui Shichun, 1983: 213). In the 1970s, a linguist, George W. Wilkins made a brilliant exposition about the importance of vocabulary in a language in his book Linguistics in Language Teaching:"without sound or grammar very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.", thus it can be seen that vocabulary occupies a decisive position in second language acquisition."There is no point in studying new words if they are not remembered"(Jim Scrivener, 2002: 88). However, vocabulary memorization has been the biggest problem for Chinese English learners, most of them find it hard to learn and memorize vocabulary, and vocabulary is the biggest barrier in their English development. Ever since the 1980s, more and more teachers and language researchers have made a large amount of research work, trying to find a better way to help English learners memorize vocabulary, but the results don't seem obvious.Cognitive theory is always emphasizing conscious learning activities, that is, wisdom activities, understanding and comprehension. In recent years, the research about cognitive theory regards second language acquisition as acquisition of complicated cognitive skills. Cognitive learning theories believe that people may make reasonable decisions based on existing information. Meaningful learning will happen the moment we connect new information with what we have already mastered to benefit our understanding and memorizing something new. Through meaningful learning, we may integrate new knowledge with existing cognitive structure more reasonably and systematically to acquire and keep knowledge. Bolinger believes that vocabulary not only exists in isolated forms in our mind, but also in the form of phrases or much longer words, and what we pick out for our memory is always in the form of phrases or much longer chunks (Nattinger, 1988: 75), that is to say, if new words and old words together compose a meaningful context, they will be stored in our memory together. As a result, when we recall some information about new words, the old words will offer some clues about picking out information by connecting new words through contexts. This research tends to explore the new way to vocabulary acquisition by combining schema theory and techniques to improve second language learners'interest and initiation in learning and lay a solid foundation in second language acquisition on all aspects.This paper mainly explored the role of schema theory and techniques in promoting English vocabulary acquisition. Since F. Bartlett advanced schema theory in 1932, a lot of scholars, such as D. Rumelhart (1980), P. Carrell (1983) and so on continue to research into this theory. Many a scholar has explored how to apply schema theory to reading comprehension, listening comprehension, translation and so on. But there is still rare exploration about applying schema theory and techniques to promoting vocabulary acquisition. From a new angle this paper explored the role of this theory and techniques in promoting Chinese middle school students'English vocabulary acquisition, making supplement to the applying strategies of vocabulary acquisition. For the convenience of statement, the author didn't distinguish foreign languages and second languages in this paper.Based on reviewing the research results by predecessors and combining the practical teaching situations this paper first explored a schema-based vocabulary acquisition strategies and techniques. Schema refers to the relevant knowledge and network, a kind of knowledge manifestation by well organizing new things and existing knowledge or experiences for us to store and deal with information in our brains more easily, or a complete information system composed by mutually-related knowledge. Schema theory believes that memorization is not duplication, but reconstruction of the content we must memorize according to the existing schema in our brains, that is, the course to integrate newly-known things with the existing schema. Using schema theory and techniques to promote vocabulary acquisition, it is required that in vocabulary acquisition the existing vocabulary knowledge should be closely combined, vocabulary acquisition and grammar learning should be integrated using the relationship between sound and form, and through activating the existing language system, the connection between new vocabulary and its system should be found out to bring new vocabulary into the system.This study took Senior Grade Three students of No. One Middle School, Yongzhou, Hunan Province as objects, and made empirical research into the role of schema theory and techniques in promoting vocabulary acquisition by means of educational statistics. During the research course, two classes were selected, one was named an experimental group, which used the schema-based vocabulary acquisition method and techniques; the other was named a control group, which used the traditional vocabulary acquisition method and techniques, and then were given pretests and posttests about vocabulary mastery respectively. After the experiment, the statistics results showed that after three-month experimental teaching, the achievements of the experimental class and the control class were improved respectively. Through contrasting analysis, it was found that the vocabulary achievements of the control class were improved significantly, while the vocabulary achievements of the experimental class were improved more significantly. T-testing results showed that the experimental group mastered vocabulary much better than the control group, that is to say, the vocabulary acquisition method based on schema theory and techniques can improve students'grasping of vocabulary more efficiently. In addition to this, the results of questionnaire investigation showed that the vocabulary acquisition method based on schema theory and techniques can obviously improve students'interest in learning vocabulary and promote their zeal in vocabulary learning, laying a solid foundation in second language learning on all aspects.
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