An Application Of Schema Theory In Senior High School Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary, which is the elementary factor in learning a foreign language, plays a great important role and it may influence the communication between people and information acquisition from articles and mass media. However, in schools, due to the limited time in a class and exam-oriental teaching attitude, teachers always assign students the task of reciting new words without proper instruction. As a result, students have to spend a lot of time memorizing new words in order to cope with teachers’ check-up. What’s worse, they forget the words in a very short time because of their unscientific learning method and perfunctory attitude. Based on schema theory, this thesis aims at finding effective solutions which can improve students’ vocabulary learning effect and change their attitude towards vocabulary learning.Schema theory which refers to the storage and application of knowledge in one’s mind provides theoretical basis to solve the problems in this article. The theory mainly discusses the relationship between memory and former knowledge (the schemata stored in one’s mind). In order to test the theory’s validity, the writer made an experiment which applied the theory into teaching practice in No.1Senior High School in Mengzhou. At the very beginning of the experiment, teaching and learning situation was surveyed through questionnaires, at the same time, pre-test was done on students. In all,110students from two classes were investigated. According to the real situation, several teaching methods were used to help students in the experimental class to learn vocabulary. Three months later, a post-test was used to test whether the experimental class has a more remarkable effect than the control class. Students in the experimental class also complete anther copy of questionnaire concerning learners’ learning attitude, learning interest, learning method, etc. and10students were selected randomly from the experimental class to have a face-to-face talk in detail about their responses to check whether they had an evident change.The data suggest that the experimental class indeed had an evident change in vocabulary memorization than the control class. The result of the questionnaire and interview showed that despite the influence of their old method, participants generally preferred to apply the method based on schema theory into their vocabulary learning. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the experiment and concrete suggestions for teachers and students.