The Application Of Schema Theory In The Teaching Of College English Writing

Along with listening, speaking and reading, writing is one of the four skills of English learning. It is considered to be an important aspect to reflect the comprehensive English level of a student, because it can not only examine the students’ability to use the language, such as vocabulary, grammar rules, syntax, discourse structure, but also show how well students know the history, culture and customs of English speaking countries. To some extent, writing can be seen as the best feedback of students’mastering of listening, speaking and reading, as well as an objective standard to measure the strengths and weaknesses of ELT. At present, English writing is tested in almost all the important English examinations at home and abroad, and its score accounts for a large proportion of the total score. However, in the daily ELT and learning, English writing is often overlooked and becomes the most difficult and weakest part for most students. Many students often feel it hard to write a satisfying English essay and get a low score in examinations. Through relevant analysis, it is discovered that the main cause of the poor performance in English writing is students’lack of related schemata and the failure of activating the stored schemata.As an important concept in the cognitive psychology field, schema theory has been wildly applied to the teaching of reading and listening, but rarely to the teaching of English writing. So this study tries to do an empirical application of schema theory to the teaching of college English writing, aiming to enrich domestic researches on the application of schema theory to the teaching of college English writing theoretically, and explore a teaching method that is more comprehensive and easier to implement in college English writing practically. The ultimate purpose is hoping to improve college students’English writing proficiency.At first, the thesis reviews the development of schema theory and the main approaches to English writing. Then the relationship between schema theory and English writing is clarified through a review and analysis on the theory and language teaching, especially on the application of the theory to reading comprehension and the close relationship between reading and writing. Second, the thesis illustrates the procedures of the experiment, mainly from three aspects:the construction, activation, and consolidation of schema. The last part is about the research report and the result analysis of the experiment. Some suggestions are put forward for teachers and students to refer to in their later teaching and learning practice.The research methods adopted in this study include tests, teaching experiment and data analysis. Two classes of 105 students from Minzu University of China participate in the study, with one class randomly chosen as the EC and the other one as the CC. The EC is taught with the schema-based approach and the CC with the traditional English writing teaching method. After a four-month teaching experiment and analyzing the results of two tests with the SPSS software, the study draws the following conclusions:1) compared with the students from the CC, the students from the EC have made significant progress on their English writing proficiency, indicating that the schema-based approach is effective on improving students’English writing ability; 2) the students from the EC have made more progress on two perspectives: content and form, than on language, which means that the schema-based approach is more likely to activate students’content and formal schema.However, due to the lack of relevant experience and the deficiency of student samples, there are some limitations of the study, and further researches are needed.