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

The ability to master vocabulary is vital in the process of any language acquisition, it has an impact on the effect of language acquisition. No one will deny the special role of vocabulary in language learning and teaching.However, there seems to be a problem in China’s high schools: for many teachers, grammar is much more important than vocabulary, if the students can read or dictate the words right, that’s all for learning vocabulary.While to many students, they hardly receive any special way of learning vocabulary,and the memorization of vocabularies is also a big problem, they may often feel embarrassed when they try to speak or write something in English for their small vocabulary. What’s more, the reality is not sufficient for the new curriculum standards’ needs, which requires the enlargement of the vocabulary for senior high school students. In order to meet the needs and to assist students grasp and use vocabularies, the teacher must alter the conventional vocabulary teaching approaches, find out new ways to teach vocabulary. Accordingly,students should also change the conventional rote way to learn and memory vocabulary.Then there comes the question: what can give us inspiration to seek such kind of new methods? Perhaps, the schema theory can give us some inspiration. As an important achievement of cognitive linguistics, the teaching pedagogy on the basis of schema theory probes the vocabulary learning process from a cognitive perspective. The scholars usually take foreign language acquisition as the acquisition of a series of mixed cognitive competences, they think that learning process will become much easier if learners connect the old data which exist in the mind with the to be learnt new ones. They also consider that the learners are able to make connections between the old and new information as long as they are trained properly, in this way, the new information is easier to remain on the minds of learners,namely, the learners could understand and remember as well as use the new information easily. So, it is helpful to guide students’ vocabulary learning and it is conductive to the improvement of students’ learning efficiency besides the cultivation of good learning custom and gradually stimulate their strong interest in learning if we attach the schema theory upon vocabulary teaching.Many scholarly persons both domestic and abroad have probed the ways to combine schema theory with senior English teaching and learning,they have made a lot of achievements as well as provided many practical methods of how to put the theory into the actual teaching. For example, they have explored how to guide the senior English reading, writing, listening or translating with the combination of schema theory. However, it is a little pity that very few empirical studies on the connection between schema theory and vocabulary teaching were done. Therefore, this thesis plans to find the ways and effects of this combination between schema theory and vocabulary teaching, to help senior students learn English vocabulary better with the reference of previous studies. Specifically, the author mainly discusses the following three questions:(1) whether the combination of schema theory and vocabulary teaching can promote high school students’ memorization of new words on the textbook;(2) whether the combination of schema theory and vocabulary teaching can assist high school students’ consolidation of the learned old words;(3) whether the combination of schema theory and vocabulary teaching can expand high school students’ vocabulary volume?This paper is written on the basis of previous studies and the actual teaching situation. In the foreword of the paper, it comes up with the research background, content and significance. The literature review part introduces some theories of schema and vocabulary learning as well as the experimental researches on the application of schema theory to vocabulary acquisition in domestic and international. The methodology part gives a simple description on the research subject, teaching materials, yet tools and procedures of the research. In results and discussion section, theexperimental data are analyzed and discussed yet the preliminary findings are reached. The major findings are concluded in the last chapter, which also includes some implications on English vocabulary acquisition in senior school as well as the limits of the research. Some suggestions for the later future studies are given too. The study finds that: the controlled class and the experimental class are almost at the same level in the pre-test and there is no significant difference in the two tests for controlled class, but in the post-test,the experimental class has improved to a great degree. This also enlightens us that: for students, they got significant progress in memorizing new words,consolidating old words and expanding vocabulary volume when they are taught by the vocabulary instruction which is on the basis of schema theory.While for teachers, we should not only give high attention to teaching vocabulary but also try best to explore new methods of vocabulary teaching,change those old models of teaching vocabularies, help students acquire vocabularies much more effectively, so as to improve the students’ comprehensive quality and improve their interests of learning English.