The Effects Of Two Schematic Variables On English Writng: From The Perspective Of Vocabulary Size And Textual Organization

English learning is important for Chinese students because of itssignificant status in a high-stake test called National MatriculationEnglish Test (NMET), but some of students cannot get good grades in thisEnglish test, especially in the writing part, even after several years ofschool learning. In order to solve this problem and shed lights on thelearning and teaching of English writing, researchers have done numerousstudies on writing, and many insightful theories and hypotheses havebeen put forward. One of the popular and influential studies is the onethat analyzes students’ writing ability under the framework of schematheory, aiming at investigating the effectiveness of schema-orientedteaching approach to writing in the hope of improving students’ writingability. But there still exist problems that deserve further exploration,such as which factors (vocabulary size, grammar, background information,knowledge on textual organization, writers’ personal experiences and etc.)impact the writing quality. Hence, different from their research angles, theauthor tries to figure out how the two schematic variables (vocabularysize and textual organization knowledge) cast influence on the writingquality.Based on the above problems, the author raises two research questions:(1) Is the correlation between students’ vocabulary size andwriting quality positive?(2) Is the correlation between student’sknowledge on textual organization and writing quality positive? In orderto answer the two questions, the present experiment randomly selected30students from Yuci No.1middle school to take the vocabulary size test,writing test and questionnaire. After detailed analyses by SPSS19.0,conclusions can be drawn: the correlation between students’ vocabularysize and writing quality is positive; so is the correlation between students’textual organization knowledge and writing quality, though the relationbetween them is not as strong as the relation between students’vocabulary size and writing quality. Finally, some suggestions are putforward to offer students and teachers some useful methods or strategiesto improve students’ writing quality: linguistic schemata can be improvedby enlarging the vocabulary size; content schemata can be developed byenriching culture background knowledge; and formal schemata can beimproved by means of enhancing cohesion and coherence knowledge aswell as enlarging textual organization knowledge.