An Empirical Study Of The Schema Theory In Vocational College ESP Teaching

ESP is the abbreviation of the English for Specific Purposes, which commonly refers toEnglish for Special Purposes. The deeper and continuous development of the economy andinternational trades puts forward higher requirements for the talents cultivation in VocationalColleges. Currently, many colleges have offered ESP courses and ESP is being paid more andmore attention to in the vocational curriculum system. ESP courses, as professional andpractice-oriented English courses, aim to cultivate students’ ability of English practicalproficiency and the problems-solving ability in specific field. Thus, the content of ESP coursesis professional, practical, authentic and directly applicable. Researches in recent years haveshown that teaching methods of ESP courses are mainly the traditional grammar-translationmethod. Students become the passive recipients of knowledge and the classroom atmosphere isboring, which makes the teaching efficiency of ESP unsatisfying. Thus, to explore effectiveclassroom teaching model to improve the efficiency of ESP teaching become the targets of theESP study.Schema theory is a theory which is used to explain the psychological process by thecognitive psychologists. Modern schema theory believes that language material does not makeany sense in itself; and people’s awareness and understanding of new entity depends on theschemata which have been stored in mind. Schemata are the knowledge units which exist inhuman mind. Generally speaking, schemata can be divided into linguistic schemata, contentschemata and formal schemata. Linguistic schemata are the readers’ prior knowledge of thelanguage, i.e. pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar knowledge; content schemata refer to thescope of article content, and the subject of article, including cultural factors and expertise;formal schemata refer to the knowledge about various structures of article. Schema theory hasbeen widely applied in language teaching since it was formed in the1970s and its effectivenessof improving the English teaching effect has been testified.This research aims to testify the effectiveness of teaching model based on schema theory inimproving the ESP teaching efficiency. Based on the teaching experience and practice, theauthor takes teaching experiment as the research method. Taking Apparel English in High Vocational College for example, the author aims to testify and verify the possibility andfeasibility of teaching model based on schema theory in improving the efficiency of ESPteaching. The experimental instruments include Pre-test and Post-test, Questionnaires andInterview.The author selected176students majored in Garment-Pattern and Techniques in ShandongSilk and Textile Vocational College as experimental subjects. Before the experiment, the statusquo of all the subjects’ ESP learning was investigated by Questionnaire I, and Pre-test wasissued to the two classes to get the academic scores of students’ Apparel English learning level.And then a Quasi-experimental study was conducted and lasted for a semester. The authorrandomly selected the experimental class and control class. Teaching model based on schematheory was conducted in Experimental Class for a semester; while traditionalgrammar-translation teaching method was adopted in Control Class. At the end of the semester,the students’ academic learning results were investigated by Post-test; and the feedbackinformation of the students’ application of schema theory strategies in learning was collected byQuestionnaire II. And a follow-up and face-to-face interview was conducted in order to get thestudents’ views and suggestions for the experimental teaching model.As for the collected experimental data, the author conducts Independent Samples T-testand Paired Samples T-test for the academic scores of Pre-test and Post-test and Questionnairesresults by statistical software SPSS for Windows16.0. And then the analyzed results aresummarized and discussed. Experimental results illustrate that ESP courses teaching modelbased on schema theory can effectively evoke the students’ enthusiasm of participation in theclass activities and improve their abilities of schema strategy application in Apparel Englishlearning, and thus improve the efficiency of ESP teaching in Vocational Colleges.Finally, the author describes the inadequacies of this research, and puts forwardrecommendations for further study in the future.