A Schema-Based Study On English Lesson Design For Junior High Schools

Schema is a nucleus conception of cognitive development psychology. It has been applied to illustrate many aspects of psychological process because of its having powerful generality and interpretation. Recently, many psychologists and psycholinguists apply schema theory to the foreign language teaching (FLT). They try to illustrate those foreign language learners' psychological process .That is, the process of learning is actually the process of learners' constructing new knowledge and experiences in their mind—schema. Only when students can link new language knowledge with relevant conception in the existing cognitive structures, or revise their old knowledge and experiences in their mind, and then construct new schema, language acquisition of them belongs to meaningful learning.The process of language learning, as well as the process of English language acquisition, is the process which students construct language knowledge and get experiences by the way of manufacturing meaningfulness. The task of language teaching is that a teacher should guide or help students get one schema and another. So, at the beginning of the language teaching, a teacher should consider "the students' centre " as a rule and try to design a teaching plan as perfectly as possible, which can act as the following: First, activating the schema already existing in the students' mind in order to form the helping collections for their language learning; then, guide them construct new schema; next, helping them consolidating the new schema; last, promoting the output of new schema.Most schema researchers apply schema theory to the English reading teaching, writing teaching, listening teaching and the lexical teaching. It is also applied to speaking (communicating ) teaching. However, the theory in English comprehension lesson—listening and speaking lesson or reading and writing lesson is sparse, especially in junior high schools in which its teaching lesson consists of listening and speaking or reading and writing.The thesis tries to describe how to use the schema theory in junior Grade Eight, and how to apply it to design and study an English lesson plan.The empirical research is made in this study which applies schema theory to design an English teaching lesson and then presents a sample lesson plan to show how it makes influence on the experiment class. The author made two questionnaire surveys for the experiment class, collected the data from results of pre-test, three school—wide exams, post-test, and then makes a careful analysis of the results. The study proves and supports the two hypothesis raised by the author. The author also finds out that after a series of training in the framework of schema theory, students increase their self-confidence and interests and improve their learning strategies, learning attitude, motives and etc.The thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One mainly introduce the background of the research and put forward the problems, methods and the significance of the research.Chapter Two revised the historical origin of schema and introduced the research on the schema theory and its achievements concerning schema home and abroad .Chapter Three to Five are the key parts of the thesis .Chapter Three introduces the significance of the schema theory applied to junior high schools' English lessons, its affection on FLT and the idea of designing lesson plans .It also discussed a sample English lesson plan.Chapter Four and Five study carefully how to apply the theory onto the English lessons in junior high schools and demonstrate the teaching strategy in FLT classroom .After analyzing the data of the experiment, the author drew the conclusion that schema theory is very effective in improving the students comprehensive competence and helping them reach the aims of language learning.