A Study On The Application Of Schema Theory To The Teaching Of Senior High English Writing

College entrance examination is rather important to senior high students.However, a majority of students can not get satisfactory marks in English writingof this exam. In addition, in daily English writing teaching, teachers get half theresult with twice the effort. Writing is a complex process which is the retrieval,usage, arrangement and development of the information stored in the mind. So interms of the importance and difficulty existing in English writing, this thesis, bycomparing and analyzing the three writing approaches, finds the disadvantages ofthe approaches, ignoring the students’ background knowledge—the influence ofthe schema on the English writing. So the author attempts to apply the schematheory to senior high English writing in order to search for a more suitable andeffective method.With the purpose, the author conducts a term empirical study on applying theschema theory to improving the writing ability of senior high students. Theresearch questions are:1). What problems do senior high students exist in theprocess of writing compositions? And is it effective to apply schema-orientedwriting instruction to solving those problems above?2). How will the students’original schemata be motivated and the new schemata constructed in their minds?3). What effects can be made on the students writing under the guidance of theschema theory?106grade3students from two parallel top classes in seniorschool are selected as the subjects in this experiment. One is control class which ispresented with the method of traditional teaching. The other is experiment classwhich is taught in the way of schema-based instruction. First by questionnaire andpre-test writing, the author aims to investigate and analysis the problems existed in students’ compositions; And then applying the schema theory to English writingfor one-term, during the process of experimental teaching, a series of activities areadopted to activate the original schema, construct the new schema and consolidatethe new schema. Finally the post-test writing and interview are done to examinewhether the schema-oriented instruction can improve the students’ writing ability.Research findings show that:(1) The common problems in students’compositions consist of incorrect diction，grammar mistakes，shallow ideas andillogical organization, which mainly cover three aspects: linguistic, content andformal schema knowledge deficiency. In addition, the schema-oriented writinginstruction can, to great extent, solve the problems existing in English writing ofsenior high students.2) In the process of schema-oriented writing instruction,doing pre-writing activities and providing related reading materials and modelessays are good ways to activate the existing schema and construct new schema.(3) By comparing and analyzing the data of pretest and posttest, the students’writing proficiency of experimental class has improved greatly, which suggestsapplying schema theory to teaching senior English writing can not only contributeto accumulating the students’ related knowledge, enriching the students’ linguistic,content and formal schema to improve their writing ability and the whole Englishproficiency, but also arouse the students’ interest and confidence in Englishwriting. So the schema-oriented instruction is an effective teaching method toenhance the writing proficiency.