The Research On The Application Of Schema Theory To English Writing Teaching In Senior High Schools

The importance of English writing is well known for a long time, and the improvement of students’ English writing ability is one of the most important tasks of senior high English teaching. However, the current situation of English writing teaching is far from satisfying and there exist many problems in students’ compositions, such as being unable to use words correctly and accurately, being unable to make sentences in a right way, being unable to organize ideas logically and the structure of article clearly and smoothly and so on. Thus it is urgent to explore an effective way to guide senior high English writing teaching.The schema theory in cognitive psychology is widely applied to the study of English reading comprehension, English listening comprehension, and schema theory has also been applied to the English writing teaching from the activation of schemata and using background knowledge by a small number of scholars. The thesis will discuss how to use schema theory to construct writing schemata and enhance the effectiveness of English writing teaching in senior high schools.An empirical research is conducted among the students from two parallel science demonstration classes in Songxian No.1 Senior High School, Luoyang. In controlled class, the traditional teaching method was adopted while in experimental class, the schema theory-based teaching approach was conducted. Through this research, the author aims to investigate the answers to the following questions:1. What difficulties will students meet in the course of writing?2. What kind of activities can be carried out to help students activate, construct and consolidate their writing schemata effectively?3. In which aspects does schema theory-based teaching approach greatly improve students’ writing abilities?During the research, both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted. A questionnaire is conducted before the experiment, the purpose of which is to explore students’ writing habits, their attitudes toward writing and the difficulties they meet in the course of writing. And after the experiment, the same questionnaire is also done, aiming to explore the changes that have taken place. At the same time, pretest and posttest are respectively held to examine the effectiveness of adopting schema theory-based teaching approach in writing teaching. All the collected data are analyzed through SPSS 21.0, including Paired- Samples T Test and Independent- Samples T Test.By analyzing the data collected from the experiment and the questionnaires, the author obtains the following major findings:1. The difficulties students meet in the course of writing mainly lie in lacking and misusing of proper and advanced vocabularies, sentence patterns, and background knowledge and discourse structures, namely, the insufficient input of linguistic schemata, content schemata and formal schemata.2. Schema theory-based teaching approach involved with speaking, reading, translating, writing, peer review and self-editing activities in the three-stage English writing teaching(pre-writing, while-writing and post-writing) proves to be effective in activating students’ existing writing schemata, constructing and consolidating their new writing schemata.3. After applying the schema theory in English writing teaching, students of EC have made greater progress than the students of CC in writing. On one hand, they have used much more advanced vocabularies, logical and transitional expressions, textual markers and complicated grammatical structures than the students of CC; on the other hand, they no longer have much difficulty in expressing their thoughts and ideas, and they hardly make grammar mistakes and show more interest in English writing. Therefore, the research of applying schema theory in English writing teaching is valid and viable.However, restricted by the author’s own knowledge and ability, there are still some limitations in the research which need further studies. Finally, some suggestions for further research on English writing teaching are put forward.