On Application Of The Reading-to-Write Approach Based On Schema Theory-An Empirical Study In A Junior High School

As new National English Curriculum Standards(2011)states,language skills play a significant role in the current language communication.And language skills include listening,speaking,reading and writing,all of which depend on each other and cannot be completely separated.It is widely acknowledged that reading and writing take great part in the Senior High School Entrance Examination in China.And due to the exam-oriented education,limited class time as well as sorts of strenuous teaching tasks,traditional teaching approach which separates writing teaching from reading teaching has long dominated the writing class and cannot effectively improve students' writing ability.According to schema theory,learners need to activate correlated schema in both reading and writing process.Reading is closely linked to writing and it facilitates the learning of writing.Therefore,it is imperative to explore an effective way to integrate writing with reading so as to enhance students' comprehensive writing ability.This thesis attempts to deal with the following three research questions:1.What is the current situation of junior high school students' English writing learning?2.How does the teacher apply the reading-to-write approach to junior high school English writing teaching?3.What are the effects of the reading-to-write approach on cultivating junior high school students' writing ability?The author carried out a comparative experiment on 84 students from two parallel classes of Grade 8 in a junior high school.One was chosen as an experimental class which was taught by the reading-to-write approach,while the other was chosenas a control class which was taught by the traditional teaching approach.The experiment lasts for about 4 months and three research instruments including questionnaires,tests,as well as interviews are adopted.And the results of the study are shown as below.Firstly,junior high students are used to separating writing learning from reading learning under the guidance of the traditional teaching approach.Secondly,the teacher applies the reading-to-write approach to writing teaching on the basis of the following seven steps: lead-in,pre-reading,while-reading,post-reading,pre-writing,while-writing,and post-writing.Thirdly,the reading-to-write approach is effective to improve students' writing ability,especially on structuring the text.Based on the findings,the author concludes several teaching pedagogical implications as follows.Firstly,when teaching reading,teachers should pay more attentions to cultivating students' discourse awareness.Secondly,it is advocated that students adopt various expressions they have learned from the reading passages to their writings.Thirdly,teachers should encourage students to accumulate correlated background knowledge to better comprehend the reading passages and enrich the content of their own writing.