| In the present college students’ EFL teaching, cultivating and developing college students’competence of EFL writing is of great necessity for their current study and future job. Comparedwith other four language skills of listening, speaking, reading and translating. Writing has beenone of the weakest parts in EFL teaching. English writing is considered the least interesting andmost difficult skill to develop. Therefore the cultivation of students’ EFL writing ability is ademanding task to be fulfilled by the English teachers in our country. So the study on EFLwriting teaching approach must be further enhanced to better instruct the learning and teachingof English writing. The present research tries to discuss college students’ EFL writing from atheoretical viewpoint of the schema theory.Based on previous researches, this study attempts to figure out whether the schema-orientedteaching approach has positive influences on improving the college students’ EFL writingcompetence or not and also attempts to arouse their interests in writing. After analyzing therelationships between English writing and schema theory, the author carries out an empiricalstudy on the employment of schema theory in the English writing teaching classes in Lirencollege of Yanshan university. Five research questions are advanced, i.e.,1) What difficultieswill the students meet when writing English compositions?2) What kind of schematicknowledge deficiency may result in students’ EFL writing errors?3) Does the employment ofschema theory in the EFL writing classes have obvious effects on improving students’ writingability?4) On what aspect does the schema-oriented teaching method have the greatest effects?5)How can teachers employ the schema theory to the teaching of EFL writing course in aneffective way to help students improve their writing abilities?In order to answer these questions, the author designs some teaching activities aiming atconstructing and activating students’ schema theory for this experiment. Both quantitative andqualitative methods are used. Two natural classes are involved in the experiment. One is theexperimental class and the other is the control class. A questionnaire is conducted at thebeginning of the experiment, which collects information about the present situation of thesubjects’ EFL writing. Through this questionnaire the author gets to know the students’ writinghabits and their attitudes toward EFL writing, as well as the difficulties they usually meet during writing. A pre-test and a post-test are conducted in the experiment. The pre-test is analyzed tofind out the typical problems which usually appear in the subjects’ writings. The post test isdesigned to examine whether the schema-oriented teaching method is effective or not. The datacollected are processed through SPSS. At last a personal interview is conducted among15subjects randomly selected from EC. The experiment last for one semester. According the datacollected from the experiment and the results of the interview, the author draws some significantconclusions:1) Most students have problems in using words, grammars and structures properly whenproducing English composition. They also feel difficult to present creative and persuasive ideasin logical ways, and they have little knowledge about genres. Moreover, they agree that theyknow little about western cultures.2) Students’ deficiency in relevant schema knowledge including linguistic schema, formalschema and content schema is the main reason for making those errors in their English writings.3) The subjects of EC have more significant progress than the subjects of CC. The dataprove that the schema theory plays an important role in the improvements of the subject’ EFLwriting proficiency.4) The subjects make the biggest progress in organization learning compared with theaspects of language and content with the instruction of schema-oriented approach. Based on thisstudy, the author proposes some strategies filling the gaps in the students’ schematic knowledge. |
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