English Discourse Construction Instruction Of Different Genres In The High School

Nowadays communicative competence has attracted great attention, and how to cultivate students'discourse construction ability has become an important goal of English teaching. Inadequate empirical research has been done on schema theory application in high school discourse construction instruction. Therefore, the present research probes the feasibility and limitations of schema theory in teaching high school English discourse construction and the different effects of schema on teaching different genres of discourse construction.None of the popular approaches to discourse construction instruction is satisfying in our country, including product-based approach, process-based approach and genre-based approach. The author applies the process genre approach which absorbed the advantages of process-based approach and the genre-based approach to conduct an empirical study, emphasizing not only on the role of students'background knowledge, i.e. schema in discourse construction, but also on the communicative purposes of the discourses and the interactions in the construction process.The experimental subjects are 40 Grade 10 students in Changsha Tongshenghu International Experimental School. Six writing tasks, two questionnaires and two interviews are conducted to investigate the effects of schema-oriented instruction qualitatively and quantitatively by comparing the experimental class with the control class with a number of 40 students.The research shows that students under the schema-oriented instruction make great progress in words selection, content arrangement and structure organization, and their written discourses are more readable after the 16-week experiments. The research also shows that the extent to which schema-oriented instruction influences discourse construction performance is related to the discourse genre. High school students make the greater improvement in expository discourse construction than in argumentative and narrative discourse construction. The present study also shows that schema-oriented instruction has different effects on different aspects in discourse construction, of which grammar seems immune to schema-oriented instruction.