An Empirical Research On The Application Of Schema Theory To Summary Writing In Senior High School

Serving as a typical academic writing form,summary writing has raised a wide concern at home and abroad.In recent years,it has been applied as a form of writing evaluation.Either from the perspective of a more satisfying performance in college entrance examination or for the benefits of students’ sustainable development,the research on training strategies for summary writing ability is imperative.Based on the schema theory,this paper analyzes the close relationship between the essentials of summary writing task and the schema theory.To cultivate the students’ specific strategies in this task,three periods of the intervention of schema theory were carried out as follows: by predicting the content based on the prior knowledge and understanding of the text to build up the content schema;through the analysis of primary and secondary information and logical relations and other means to deconstruct the discourse and by drawing the structure of the given passage to construct a brief discourse structure for summary writing,that is the formal schema;through language and grammar conversion to establish the linguistic schema.Moreover,the researcher designed a form of critical reflection for students to self check the strategies outlined in the three schemata.Meanwhile,its effects can also be assessed by observing and analyzing students’ summary writing and the journal of reflection.Investigation and research have proved that during the process,the establishment of schemata could effectively promote the students’ abilities in the comprehensible input and output of the text,improve students’ access to information and information processing,achieve the staircase growth of students’ thinking and enhance comprehensive ability of using language,and further cultivate students’ writing ability.Meanwhile,the interview results and the reflection logs further indicate that the use of schema theory can effectively improve students’ confidence in summary writing.In this paper,the advantages and disadvantages are found through analyzing the results of the experiment in order to give some suggestions on the improvement of the schemata under the guidance of the schema theory.In conclusion,this study to some degree is of significance to the exploration of the pattern of English summary writing in senior high school.