A Study Of The Schema Theory-based Reading To Writing Model In Teaching College English Writing

Chinese universities attach great importance to English, advising their students that English writing is an important skill to learn. Yet,writing is often undervalued in college English classrooms, and the students grow to fear it. Facing this predicament, it's extremely urgent to rethink how English is taught.The author raises these questions about writing in college English classes: (1) why do college students lack initiative in their writing? (2)What are the writing strategies for students in English writing? (3) Why are students' writing skills so low? The aim of this study is to identify the difficulties students have in writing in English and to suggest modalities that will improve their writing.Based on the schema theory and the integration of input, output, and interaction theories, the author constructs the teaching model of the"Reading to Writing Model," henceforth the RtW Model. It employs intensive reading of articles in college English textbooks, inputting language knowledge of related topics and strategies of writing, and then outputting the writing. In short, reading to improve writing. The students work in small groups, and teachers guide and provide assistance. The RtW Model is composed of five teaching procedures: comprehensible input, absorbing and integrating, comprehensible output, interactional feedback, and revised output.Comprehensible input refers to providing relevant background and language knowledge to supplement the unit's topic. Students are expected to discuss the materials and expand on them by issue-spotting or improvisational conjecture. This procedure can provide an ideas repository for the later writing. Absorbing and integrating refers to intensive reading, language analyzing, and structuring and thinking guided by the schema theory. The schema can be divided into language schema, form schema, and content schema. Comprehensive output refers to agreeing on the writing's theme, structure, and content by group discussion. The group then assigns the writing tasks to individuals.Interactional feedback refers to peer reviewing in groups the language,forms, and content guided by the teacher. Its purpose is to help the students to understand clearly and deeply the process of English writing,and to develop self-critical skills in their writing. Revised output refers to proofreading the compositions in groups to consolidate and reinforce the learned knowledge.The author used empirical research to explore whether or not the RtW Model can improve the students' writing ability. Thirty-eight students, who majored in computer science at the Wenzhou Business School, class of 2015, were the research subjects. The research took two months. The author used questionnaires and composition tests as research methods and analyzed the experimental data by SPSS20.0.The results are summarized as follows:(1) Students' motivations to write in English gradually increased.(2) Students' strategies for writing in English increased.(3) Students' abilities to write in English improved.These findings suggest that the RtW Model can effectively improve students' motivations, strategies and abilities in writing in English. And the findings suggest new ways to teach college English. However due to the limited scope of this research project, the short time allowed, and the sample size and quality, the conclusions offered are limited to the questions posed in the thesis statement. To this the author will try to overcome these problems in future research.