Research On The Application Of Formal Schema To The Teaching Of College English Writing

In College English Teaching in China, English writing has been a thorny problem for students as well as a weak link in modern English teaching. Many students are unable to write a complete, appropriate and lucid paragraph even after they have learned English for many years. In the past few years, researchers at home and abroad have done much work on how to improve students' foreign language writing ability. All the studies were made on the lexical or syntactic level, which are of great significance for beginners or average-leveled learners to help them improve their writing skills. However, what the advanced learners need improving is not only on the linguistic level, but rather on textual level. In order to solve this problem, the author applied the formal schema theory to the instructing of College English writing, aiming at improving the advanced learners' discourse writing ability.The schema theory is interpreted as a psychological process by cognitive psychologists and employed in foreign language teaching to explain the psychology of foreign language learning process. However, the application of this theory is mainly confined to explaining the psychological process of the development of language input skills while the application to language output skills, i.e., writing and speaking is neglected. The difference in the way of thinking between the Chinese and the English speakers leads to the writing differences in the way of cohesion, the development of paragraphs and different genres. The feature of English discourse is a "linear" type whereas the Chinese discourse a "spiral" one. Not having established right English discourse patterns, the Chinese writers often organize an English paragraph in the Chinese mode of rhetoric which hardly conforms to an English discourse mode, thus an English composition written by an advanced Chinese learner is often puzzling to the native English speakers. The author is inspired by the advantages of applying formal schema theory to inputting process and holds that it is essential to helping the students improve their writing skills by establishing right patterns. Therefore, the author tried to apply formal schema theory to College English writing, assuming that it is beneficial for the improvement of the advanced learners' writing ability.To testify this hypothesis, the author investigated the students from four classes in Grade 2007 from the College of Liberal Arts in Hunan Normal University by means of questionnaire and interview in order to find out the Chinese students' problems in English writing. And the author conducted a teaching experiment which lasted for a semester upon the subjects from the model class. The focus was on the teaching of four English writing genres. After the experiment, the author made a Paired-Sample T Test of all the data by means of SPSS10.0. The result of the analysis shows that there are great differences in the scores between pre-test and post-test. This indicates that using formal schema is of great help for students to form right English discourse and stylistic schema, thus improving their writing ability as well as arousing their interest in English writing and cultivating their English thought pattern.Due to the time length and restriction of experimental conditions, this study has some limitations, for example, the samples are convenience samples and the experiment is conducted on Chinese majors, so the students are more or less influenced by their mother tongue. Nevertheless, the author thinks that this study is of certain theoretical and practical significance, for it presents the enlightenment for the teaching of College English writing in China.