Application Of Schema-Based Construal Approach To The Teaching Of English Argumentative Writing:An Empirical Study

English argumentative writing is a key part of college English writing.It mainly includes three aspects: theme analysis,discourse coherence and syntactic construction.Previous studies on EFL writing are restricted to second language acquisition and systematic functional linguistics.Most of them view argumentative writing as a language issue only,ignoring its writing process and cognitive mechanism.Recently,although some scholars investigate it from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,none of them discusses it with the combination of schema theory and construal theory,let alone the empirical study on it.The present study considers English argumentative writing as a dynamic schema-based construal process and proposes the schema-based construal approach to account for it.The new approach contains four maxims and is able to interpret the cognitive mechanisms involved in English argumentative writing.To verify its efficacy on EFL writing,an empirical study is conducted.The author selects 80 sophomores of non-English majors from Sichuan International Studies University as the subjects,40 in the empirical class and 40 in the control class.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used in this research.The subjects are first invited to write a CET4 composition as the pretest.Then the empirical class receives the schema-based construal approach for writing instruction while the control class is instructed in the traditional way.After the four-month English writing instruction,they write another CET4 composition as the post-test.At the same time,15 students from the empirical class take a personal interview after the experiment.Finally,the results of the experiment will be collected and analyzed by SPSS 16.0.The research hypotheses of this thesis are listed as following:1.The schema-based construal approach can effectively facilitate the students' writing competence by improving their cognitive ability in theme analysis,discourse coherence and syntactic construction.2.Teaching with the schema-based construal approach,students hold an aroused interest in EFL writing.The present study indicates that writing is more of a dynamic cognitive process.Schema-based construal is the main cognitive approach in theme analysis and language expression.The four maxims in the new approach(scope,focus,viewpoint and specificity)exist in the writing process of theme analysis,discourse coherence and syntactic construction and help students better understand the cognitive process of argumentative writing.The students of empirical class greatly improved their writing competence and writing interest with the guidance of the new teaching approach.Thereby,the author puts forward some pedagogical suggestions to improve the efficiency of college English writing instruction.