An Empirical Study Of The Application Of Schema Theory In Senior High School English Vocabulary Teaching

Vocabulary is one of the most important parts of language which has influences on the communication between people, the accumulation of knowledge and the improvement of language ability. In recent years, with the development of new curriculum reform, the new English curriculum standard puts forward higher and more specific requirements on students’ ability, especially enlarging students’ vocabulary. Thus, vocabulary teaching becomes the key point and difficult point in Senior High School English teaching. In traditional English vocabulary teaching, though teachers urge students to remember vocabulary, they don’t provide too much applicable methods to enlarge students’ vocabulary and to use vocabulary effectively. As a result, students memorize the vocabulary mechanically. In this way, it is easy for students to forget what they have learned before. Because of the low efficiency and slow reading speed, students’ interest in learning vocabulary becomes lower and lower. Meanwhile,it is not good for students to improve their ability of communication in English. Therefore,teachers need to find effective vocabulary teaching methods to help students to enlarge their vocabulary and improve their English level.The German philosopher Kant proposed the concept of schema in 1781. The British psychologist Bartlett proposed schema theory in 1932. After that, many scholars both at home and abroad have done a plenty of intensive researches in schema theory and put the schema theory into English teaching. However, most of these researches pay attention to English reading, writing and listening. It remains comparatively rare researches to apply the schema theory into English vocabulary teaching. Hence, the main emphasis of this study is to explore how to apply schema theory in English vocabulary teaching in senior high school in order to promote students’ vocabulary learning, enlarge their vocabulary, promote their efficiency of vocabulary learning and enhance students’ vocabulary learning ability.This research adopted the method of experimental research which combines the qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis. The study sample was randomly selected from two classes of Grade Two in Panshan Senior High School(N=80). They were divided into a control class and an experimental class. Each class involved 40 students. The teacher mainly used questionnaire, pre-test and post-test to collect data. And the data of pre-test and post-test were analyzed by SPSS 17.0. The research results show that there are significant differences between the experimental class and the control class after the experiment. Compared with traditional vocabulary teaching methods, the schema-based vocabulary teaching method can help improve students’ interest in vocabulary learning and improve their English vocabulary learning. Finally, some limitations of this research are discussed. Some implications of this research are summarized and some suggestions for further research are also proposed.