Application Of Formal Schema Theory To English Writing For Non-English Majors

This paper explores the application of formal schema theory to the college English writing teaching of non-English majors. The schema theory has been applied in reading comprehension, listening and cloze teaching. However, the study done on schema theory in English writing teaching is sparse. So it leaves gaps for further study. The focus of this present study is argumentation writing, the concentration of the experiment is on designing teaching plans to train students to improve their writing level.An experimental class (EC) and a control class (CC) were chosen to be the subjects of the experiment. In the CC the conventional teaching method was used. In the EC, a formal schema-based reading-writing integrated method was applied, great attention was paid to the patterns of argumentation and coherence. During the whole process of teaching, the teacher carried out schema theory persistently, that is, activating the relevant schemata in the students' minds, and building up the new schemata. The data of two questionnaires and three tests was collected and analyzed by SPSS 10.0. The research results showed that activating stored formal schemata and inputting new schemata actually facilitated students' writing ability.During the writing training, the different formal schemata between English and Chinese text patterns and the use of coherence devices were compared. As far as coherence devices are concerned, English is hypotactic while Chinese is paratactic. About paragraph development, English follows a lineal order, while Chinese tends to be a spiral order. The research showed that the Contrastive analysis is an effective method for students to grasp the key points of writing.The paper is made up of seven chapters. In Chapter One, the necessity and significance of the present study is introduced through analyzing the current situation of Chinese college students' writing in English. Chapter Two is a literature review involving research into writing and schema theory. Chapter Three mainly introduces schema theory and some other important theories that relate to the present study. Chapter Four analyzes some problems in EFL writing due to different schemata between Chinese and English and explores the application of schema theory to EFL writing. Chapter Five describes research design, which includes questionnaires, tests and writing training procedures, in which an advanced organizer approach by Ausubel is introduced. Chapter Six deals with data collection and analysis. Chapter seven provides the general discussion and conclusion, points out the limitations of the study and puts forward some suggestions for teaching and further research.