The Mixed Formal Schemata In High School Students' English Writing And Its Improvement

Since the late 70s, schema theory has been increasingly applied to the researches of foreign language teaching. The main viewpoint of the theory can be simply understood as: when people begin to comprehend new things, they generally combine new things with the known concept or previous experience (background knowledge); the comprehension of new things is mainly driven by the known structure of knowledge (named as schema) in their mind and the input messages should be checked or compared in accordance with the known structure of knowledge. According to the nature of the content (Carrell& Eisterhole, 1983), schemata can be categorized as linguistic schema, content schema and formal schema, and they are respectively linguistic knowledge, knowledge of the content of the discourse and knowledge of form or layout of the discourse, and are all embedded in people's mind to be activated in the process of writing. Formal schema includes the background knowledge of the formal, rhetorical, organizational structure and can provide a general framework and guideline for the writer to organize a composition. However, common problems in Chinese students'English writing such as lack of cohesion between the paragraphs, loose text structure, disorderly arrangement, and vague theme and so on suggest that students'formal schemata of writing is far from being perfect.The Chinese students'English composition generally and frequently gives the reader an impression that it is neither English style nor Chinese style and it is"between both ends", which might be explained as the consequences of co-existence of the English formal schema and Chinese formal schema in their mind. Therefore, the concept of"the mixed formal schemata"is coined to describe the mixing of English formal schema and Chinese formal schema in the writer's mind. The mixed formal schemata involve the mental activity, which can not be observed directly but can be reflected by the mixed text, in the following three aspects: cohesive device, paragraph structure and text structure. The degree of mixed formal schema can be evaluated by the percentage of mixture of text and the percentage of mixture of text might indicate the percentage of the roles that both the English formal schema and Chinese formal schema play in the students'English writing.In order to confirm the above statement, a survey on the high school students'English writing samples has been carried out. The results indicate that the mixed formal schemata widely exist in the high school students'English writing and the degree of mixed formal schemata varies respectively in three aspects. The degree of mixture about the paragraph structure and text structure are particularly high. Based on the current situation of the English writing teaching in high school, the reasons of mixed formal schemata, such as the deficiency and inadequate-activation of English formal schema and the intervention of Chinese formal schema and so on can be naturally concluded. Meanwhile, some strategies on realizing the transformation of Chinese-English formal schemata are proposed and some concrete operation in the high school English class is also designed with the prospect of improving the mixed formal schemata in the high school students'mind and finally relieving the mixture of their English composition.