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

English writing is one of the indispensable components of English teaching and learning, and is the comprehensive reflection of students’ ability of listening, speaking, reading and translation. Whether students can employ the mastered English knowledge to communicate can be fully reflected in their writing. However, the current situation of English writing teaching in Senior High School is unsatisfying. The difficulties in fluently expressing ideas and reasonably organizing the article, as well as the fear to writing are students’ general problems when facing the writing. The current writing teaching method does not seem to be very efficient, so how to improve the present situation of the students’ difficulty in writing has been one of the most difficult problems. Therefore, this research tries to reform the current writing teaching situation to some extent, and thus English writing teaching based on schema theory is proposed.Schema is a kind of cognitive structure stored in individuals’ mind. It can help people understand new information, activate and construct new knowledge. Schema is also helpful to build the relationship between the old and new knowledge, so as to easily organize and express ideas. There are extensive researches of schema theory in teaching reading and listening, which has revealed that it is facilitated for senior high school students to understand and obtain new knowledge under the guidance of schema theory. Nevertheless, the research about the applications of the schema theory in writing teaching is limited. So combining schema theory with the elements of writing, namely from three aspects of linguistic schema, formal schema and content schema, the author tries to test the effect of the application.This research selects 114 students in two parallel classes from senior grade 2 of Zhengzhou No.74 Middle School as the research subjects. The instruments employed in the thesis include documentation, experiment, questionnaire, and interviews. By combining schema theory with English writing teaching, the author has designed the English writing teaching activities. Through one-semester teaching practice, the study results show that:(1) the schema-oriented instruction has a positive effect on students’ writing proficiency;(2) the schema-oriented English writing instruction has the most obvious effect on students’ content schema, next is formal schema and the last is linguistic schema;(3) with the aid of the schema theory, the students’ attitudes towards English writing have become more positive than before. Moreover, the study affords some effective teaching strategies and reliable data for English writing in senior high school, which provides the reference for improving students’ writing proficiency.